Digital transformation, or DX is all about how to digitalize the way that you are doing businesses from product design all the way through manufacturing to marketing to control all these processes smartly and intelligently.

For years, the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Start-ups has financed Korean’s manufacturers’ efforts to rebuild their respective manufacturing facilities around DX platform, having poured about 1 trillion won. In 2021 alone, the ministry have invested 441.2 billion won to help the country’s small and medium corporations to digitalize their manufacturing operations.

The policy initiative has paid off handsomely, helping about 25,039 factories to digitalize their manufacturing processes over the last 3 years in what’s called smart factory build-up policy initiative, as the ministry financed 30% of their total smart factory build-up costs

The DX initiative proves a winning strategy, as those newly-digitalized factories saw a 28.5% gain in productivity on average, while benefitting from a 15.5% cut in costs, according to the ministry.              

KAMP : AI Manufacturing Platform

This year alone, the ministry will pour about 366.3 billion won again to finance more than 5,000 factories’ digital transformation, achieving its 3-year goal of rebuilding 30,000 factories around DX platform by 2022. Of the total, 247.5 billion won will be invested to upgrade these smart factories’ DX processes around Big Data. AI and digital twin platform.     

On the way toward that goal, the ministry will help a consortium of companies to build up a digital cluster network through which companies in the network not only to string together their smart factories across a communications platform but also collectively and remotely control and manage every manufacturing process from start to finish.

For example, the digital cluster network will enable them to collectively manage   inventories of raw materials as well as parts and components down the road to  order-booking to production to marketing to even logistics and deliveries.

The ministry will also allow small and medium sized manufacturers to get access to its AI manufacturing platform KAMP (Korea AI manufacturing platform) to analyze their respective manufacturing data to find the most optimal manufacturing environment.

Established in 2020 to support small-and medium-sized companies’ manufacturing data collection and analyze, the KAMP is also enabling companies to detect,  diagnose, and shoot troubles across manufacturing assembly lines using AI and Big Data Analysis algorithm.

One more smart manufacturing testbed will be also built, adding to current two testbeds in operation to allow more of companies to test-run and experiment their roadmap plan for smart factory build-up before they embark on actual construction.