Made in China, the Honeywell Way

The newly-released fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) reiterates China’s commitment to encouraging innovation and digitalization. The whole world has been witnessing traditional manufacturing being replaced rapidly by modern manufacturing, and China is already leading the development of new industries built around the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, big data, 5G networks, to name just a few. Digital transformation has become the driving force for this trend.

Based on the German government’s Industry 4.0 development plan, the digitization of China’s industrial power is designed to move China away from cheap, unskilled labor to become a high-end producer of goods – thereby domestically fulfilling the demands of China’s increasingly wealthy home-consumer base. The strategy focuses heavily on intelligent manufacturing and industrial digitization in ten strategic sectors, including aerospace, securing China’s position as a global powerhouse in high-tech industries such as robotics, quantum computing and aviation, and in new, greener energy sources such as electric and biogas.

Two of the main foundations of the strategy are investment in the domestic supply chain and in research and development (R&D). The core industries covered by the plan are expected to source 40% of all “core” inputs domestically by 2020 and over 70% by 2025 – with significant implications for the domestic supply chain. As for R&D, China’s spending on research and development climbed 10.3% to 2.44 trillion Chinese yuan ($378 billion) in 2020, according to the nation’s National Bureau of Statistics.

To drive this ambitious plan, the Chinese government has established state funds that together manage over US$5 trillion in assets. These funds are investing in tech start-ups in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics and aerospace. Within the aerospace sector specifically, China wants its indigenous commercial aircraft to represent 10% of the domestic fleet and up to 20% of the global market by 2025. This clearly represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for China’s rising aerospace industry.

Honeywell is uniquely placed to assist customers with fulfilling the expectations of the Chinese government in relation to industrial digitization, while also enabling them to reap the benefits of the “Connected Factory”. As a high-tech enterprise that has been deeply rooted in China for many years, Honeywell is committed to implementing its "East for East" and “East to Rest” strategies, leveraging smart technologies and IoT / SaaS-based solutions to innovate for growth.

Honeywell’s HOS (Honeywell Operating System) has been implemented in over 390 Honeywell sites worldwide, delivering an advanced manufacturing operation management experience that has helped the company secure sustained growth beyond market expectations. This global success story is now available to aerospace customers – and their suppliers through Honeywell’s Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), a SaaS-based manufacturing operation management platform system.

Honeywell MOM combines HOS with recognized LEAN principles to achieve: Efficient collaboration, Lean Management and Persistent Improvement. By adopting these principles, factories can reduce the waste from information transition and loss, maximize resource utilization through the efficient collaboration of labor, equipment, materials, improve overall production efficiency while reducing operation costs, and learn to utilize big data to identify opportunities for improvement. Together, these pillars of the MOM system will deliver digital transformation while establishing management competitive advantages.

Honeywell MOM is a step towards the realization of a truly-connected factory. A utopian state where building and connecting software solutions streamline and centralize the assets, people, and processes that help our customers make smarter, more accurate business decisions.