China's Economic & Human Workforce Transformations Accelerate

China's economic & human workforce transformations continue to accelerate, this time with the facilitization and provisioning of China's first fully operational unmanned factory.


Located in Dongguan city, all of the factory's processes are operated by robots and have had a tremendous impact on a workforce reduction (reducing employees from 650 before automation down to 60, workers now with a target of just 20 in the future) while at the same time slashing the product defect rate from over 25% down to 5% and at the same time boosting production capacity from more than 8,000 pieces per person per month to 21,000 pieces per person per month. 

While on the surface this is positive news for China's industrial competitiveness there will also be business and process challenges in having robots work side by side and integrate with human works and also the social cost of dislocated and displaced former factory workers, many unskilled or lower skilled.

[more] China's Unmanned Factory