Haier Group undertook a multi-site Official SIRI Assessment to gain a deeper understanding of their facilities’ 4IR maturity levels. This assessment enabled Haier to uncover blind spots within their operations and benchmark their facilities’ Industry 4.0 transformation against industry standards and competitors. By pinpointing areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, Haier could validate their progress and make informed decisions to enhance their competitive edge in the market.
Founded in 1984, Haier Group (Haier) is a global Chinese company that provides innovative home
appliances and consumer electronics to more than 1 billion users across 160 countries. To effectively
manufacture and supply high-quality products to its consumers worldwide, Haier has been a pioneer in
deploying new innovations into its manufacturing plants. From IoT in the early 2010s to the Fourth Industrial
Revolution, Haier’s continued efforts to adopt new technologies have enabled its factories to expand
production capacity to meet increasing market demand, as well as reducing inefficiencies and wastage
Findings from the OSA showed that Haier’s sites consistently performed as well as, or better than, the
Best-in-Class (Top 10%) maturity profile under the 3B Maturity Benchmark, across all three SIRI building blocks (Process, Technology and Organization). This served as a strong validation of Haier’s ongoing efforts to create Best-in-Class smart manufacturing plants.
Haier attributed its Best-in-Class maturity profile – particularly in the Process building block and Connectivity pillar, where average maturities were greater than Band 4 – to the deployment of its COSMOPlat industrial internet platform, which was developed in-house. Coupled with advanced technologies such as 5G and edge computing, Haier was able to leverage COSMOPlat to restructure and integrate its processes vertically on the factory floor, and horizontally across the entire production value chain.
By doing a comparative analysis of the OSA results across Haier’s four sites, the global transformation
team were able to identify opportunities to strengthen the company’s digitalization programme. These
discoveries will help pave the way for interventions that will form part of Haier’s future transformation plans.
