Chongqing, CN - Lighthouse award in Productivity

This plant makes traditional Chinese medicines whose raw materials are agricultural products with naturally variable composition, in a market reshaped by rising healthcare demand, more diverse herb sources, growing personalized orders and tighter regulation. Process control had long depended on the tacit experience of senior technicians and qualitative cues such as colour and shape, which left batch quality unstable and made it hard to run mass production, small-batch and custom orders on shared capacity. The site deployed more than thirty 4IR use cases across the value chain, quantifying tacit know-how into data, putting near-infrared and machine-vision detection on the line, and balancing diverse demand through an optimization-based planning system. Batch-to-batch quality variation fell by 33%, labour productivity rose from 7.64 to 10.49 tons per employee, site OEE climbed from 62.8% to 75.6%, and manufacturing conversion cost dropped 9.5%.