Industry Background
As one of the key sectors in the green energy industry, the photovoltaic industry has achieved rapid growth in recent years under the "dual-carbon" goals. However, the fluctuating prices of silicon-based raw materials have resulted in persistently high operating costs for photovoltaic manufacturers. Reducing costs and increasing efficiency has thus become an inevitable path for the industry's development. For photovoltaic enterprises, it is essential not only to optimize the energy efficiency of equipment but also to reduce costs in non-hardware operations. As a result, digital transformation and intelligent upgrading have become critical drivers for the industry. These will help enhance production efficiency, improve product quality, strengthen market competitiveness, and achieve sustainable development throughout the entire lifecycle.
Management Challenges
The photovoltaic industry is structured around silicon and spans 23 links across the upstream, midstream, and downstream segments, including polysilicon, silicon wafers, cells, modules, and power plants. It integrates both process-based operations (such as material feeding and crystal pulling) and discrete manufacturing processes (such as machining silicon rods and assembling PV modules), making it a typical hybrid industry. The manufacturing process of photovoltaic products is complex, involving many production steps and stringent quality requirements. As a result, enterprises face many management challenges in production:
- Production plans can not be easily formulated accurately and cannot respond to market demands in a timely manner
- Variations in polysilicon purity across batches and unstable cell-processing quality
- Numerous procedures and complex processes in silicon wafer and cell production, making production tracking difficult
- High dependence on equipment, resulting in stringent requirements for equipment maintenance, repair, consumables, and data control
- Difficulties in data collection and analysis during production, with feedback not being timely
- High rework rates in furnace loading, squaring, and wafer inspection; frequent errors in crystal pulling and ingot batching, making loss statistics difficult
Solution
Morewis's digital solution for the photovoltaic industry supports the entire manufacturing process—from automatic material feeding to final packaging—covering production scenarios such as silicon wafer fabrication, cell manufacturing, and module assembly. By collecting, monitoring, and tracing key elements of production (including personnel, equipment, materials, methods, and environment), the solution enables accurate production planning, efficient process management, and lean quality control. At the same time, the system automatically acquires process parameters from equipment interfaces and, together with its built-in structured data analysis tools, helps quickly identify and resolve production issues. This continuous analysis and optimization improve process stability and product quality, ultimately enabling photovoltaic enterprises to achieve rapid mass production and maximize capacity.
Blueprint for Planning and Building a Digital Factory for PV Cell Manufacturing
Addressing Core Needs
- Implement full barcode-based warehouse operations, enabling mobile warehouse tasks and flexible material management. The system strictly enforces FIFO and provides alerts for slow-moving or obsolete materials. It also integrates with intelligent logistics equipment such as AGVs and automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) to trigger warehouse material delivery, improving warehouse operation efficiency.
- Enable visual drag-and-drop scheduling and intelligent plan adjustments, allowing flexible coordination among workshops, production lines, and planning. The system allows real-time tracking of plan execution and transparent monitoring of WIP work orders.
- Collect key process data and report completion results to the system, enabling real-time statistics on labor hours and production takt time, with fully transparent visibility into production progress.
- Achieve fine-grained traceability, establishing basket-level ID and wafer-level ID traceability and control. The system provides end-to-end, full-process, comprehensive 4M1E traceability from material feeding to final packaging.
- Implement comprehensive TPM management, enabling refined control of equipment asset records, maintenance planning, inspections, and routine maintenance. The system builds an equipment maintenance knowledge base and provides full-process closed-loop management and traceability.
- Enable systematic lifecycle management of tooling, fixtures, and spare parts, including asset records, inspections, maintenance, borrowing, and usage tracking.
- Collect quality data through IQC, FAI, IPQC, FQC, OQC, and perform multi-dimensional SPC process statistical analysis. The system supports multi-level early-warning mechanisms and closed-loop handling of abnormal events, including initiation, analysis, disposition, and traceability.
- Integrate with the WisIOT intelligent IoT system to automatically collect and monitor data parameters from key production and inspection equipment in real time. Dynamic dashboards visualize analysis results, while abnormalities are automatically alerted.
- Integrate with the WisBI intelligent analytics system to build a comprehensive transparent-production management system, enhancing on-site response speed and enabling data-driven decision-making.
Integration of Warehouse Operations with Intelligent Logistics AGVs and AS/RS Equipment
Manufacturing Process Control Points
Implementation Benefits
- Optimize production planning and scheduling, enabling flexible adjustments at workshop and production-line levels, and improving overall line efficiency.
- Connect the traceability data chain to build a full-process traceability platform, ensuring stable and controllable product quality.
- Strengthen process quality control through comprehensive quality management, reducing product defect rates.
- Integrate with equipment to achieve automatic data collection, reduce manual intervention, and lower error rates.
- Enable paperless on-site operations, digitizing and mobilizing equipment, process, production, and facility inspection tasks.
- Visualize production data in real time, providing an accurate view of workshop operations and achieving transparent production.
