Nokia’s factory of the future in Oulu recognized by the World Economic Forum

Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia announced today that Nokia’s Oulu factory, which utilizes Industry 4.0 concepts for 5G and 4G base station manufacturing, has been awarded by the World Economic Forum as an Advanced 4th Industrial Revolution Lighthouse.

Nokia’s factory in Oulu produces 1,000 4G and 5G base stations per day and using Nokia’s private 4.9/LTE network, IoT analytics on Edge Cloud and other technologies, it “generated significant annual improvements, including more than 30 percent productivity gains, 50 percent savings in time of product delivery to market, and an annual cost savings of millions of euros.”

A recent Wall Street Journal article concerning the possible US decisions in the ongoing US-China trade war cited Citi analysts Amit Harchandani and Robert Lamb estimate that in 2018 around 10% of Nokia’s manufacturing capabilities were in China, while the rival Ericsson had 45%. Seeing that Nokia’s Oulu factory is pushing 1,000 base stations per day, this info is more believable, showing that Nokia really diversified their manufacturing areas.

The “Lighthouse” program by the WEF is conducted in cooperation with McKinsey. The goal of the program is to select factories that improve the way they operate in different aspects. Nokia’s factory utilizes Nokia’s technology and is the best way of showing potential industrial buyers how good Nokia’s products are, when the company uses them in mass production.

Heikki Romppainen, Head of Oulu Factory, Nokia, said: “For factory employees, the automation of our Oulu manufacturing environment increases flexibility and adaptability. The ‘conscious factory’ has evolved the working ecosystem – increasing motivation and the wellbeing of employees by automating the traditionally repetitive tasks, making work more diversified and productive.”

Kathrin Buvac, President of Nokia Enterprise and Chief Strategy Officer, said:
“We are paving the way for enterprise customers to realize the vision of Industry 4.0 and industrial automation by applying our technology to our manufacturing needs. For our Oulu 5G facility, we created a ‘factory of the future’ environment leveraging private wireless networks for reliable and secure in-factory connectivity, edge cloud and IoT analytics. We are very pleased that our technology has delivered productivity gains of over 30 percent for our factory and we look forward to sharing this expertise with customers, helping them accelerate growth and unlock their full potential.”

Demonstrated use cases in Oulu pre-production factory include:

• Virtualization of new product introduction (NPI)
• Flexible robotics to ensure high-productivity and agility for continuous new ramp-ups
• 4.9G/LTE Private wireless network to speed up NPI line re-layout
• Cloud-based digital data control, enabling real-time process management
• No-touch internal logistics automation via connected mobile robots

We already covered Venture Beat’s article about Nokia’s factory of the future in Finnish city Oulu and you can check that here.

Source: Nokia