PRESS RELEASE: During MWC Barcelona 2024, Haier Smart Home and China Mobile won the GTI ‘Innovative Mobile Service and Application Award’ for their digital production material management solution based on 5G-Advanced passive IoT (PIoT, ambient IoT).
The award recognizes their efforts to drive digital production using innovative mobile technologies. Haier Smart Home is a leading global home appliance manufacturer, who has focused on digitalizing its manufacturing processes. As one of the world’s biggest operators, China Mobile improves network infrastructure, prompts customer services, and provides digitalization solutions for vertical industries. Haier partnered with China Mobile Research Institute and China Mobile Shandong, launched an automated and digital production material management system based on 5G-Advanced cellular PIoT. This system enables enterprises to effectively track logistics information along the entire supply chain, helping them reduce costs and improve efficiency.
GTI is an international industry cooperation platform that aims to bring operators and industry partners together to discuss common concerns and brainstorm solutions. Its ‘Innovative Mobile Service and Application Award’ is awarded to operators and vendors who provide innovative 5G and 5G-Advanced mobile services, applications, and solutions for consumers and vertical industries.
The passive IoT application practice winning this awards is an exploration of China Mobile’s in-depth enablement of industry innovation based on communications technologies. Based on deploying a 5G-Advanced PIoT (ambient IoT) network by China Mobile, the factory achieves automatic material management. Tags harvest energy from their surroundings to power themselves. This means they do not need batteries, which in turn reduces power consumption and costs. PIoT has four advantages over RFID: longer-distance coverage, stronger support for networking, more accurate stocktaking, and a wider range of applications.
The PIoT technology has been implemented in the Haier Qingdao Washing Machine Interconnected Factory, which is the world’s first “lighthouse factory” based on 5G-A application. It also belongs to one of the demonstration bases of China Mobile’s dual-chain integration of “Innovation Chain-Industry Chain”. 5G-Advanced passive IoT digital management system for production materials will accelerate the digital transformation of factories. In Haier, 5G-Advanced PIoT has helped Haier increase the frequency of its warehouse stocktaking from monthly to daily, improve the material delivery efficiency of its production lines by 50%, and reduce the number of material delivery vehicles required by 50%. Also 5G-Advanced PIoT enables transparent supply and consumption of materials at commercial production lines and allows potential material shortages to be promptly detected.
This joint innovative application practice by Haier and China Mobile promotes the application of 5G-Advanced passive IoT technologies in the smart manufacturing industry. What is more, it also sets a benchmark for the application of passive IoT technologies in other industries, helping open a new IoT space of hundreds of billions of connections.