The "Intelligent Asia Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing Series Exhibition" was debuted on December 15. Vice President Lai Ching-te announced at the opening ceremony that the government will work hand in hand with enterprises to comprehensively promote smart transformation and achieve smart production, manufacturing, and sales. Thus, Taiwan is being transformed and rebranded as a high-end manufacturing center in Asia.

  Smart manufacturing can, with the right combination of technological innovations such as AI, IoT, sensors and robots, bring many benefits to the manufacturing industry, including improving the results of product design and efficiency, production efficiency, flexibility and autonomy, efficiency of quality inspections and an enhanced yield, improved equipment availability, reduced maintenance costs, increased supply chain operation efficiency and flexibility, and reduced costs. As indicated by Gartner, 80% of IoT devices within the global manufacturing industry will be using AI technology in the future, meaning that companies will not only resort to IoT to obtain machine/production line data, but also work to reduce data interpretation and analysis through AI.

  TPCA conducted a survey regarding the extent of smart manufacturing among PCB factories in Taiwan. In terms of data concatenation, DI exposure machines, AOI, and AVI are believed to be the most advanced equipment, whereas "introduction not cost-effective" and "existing equipment too obsolete to upgrade” are considered the primary reasons for low level of equipment data concatenation. "Data concatenation" is defined as when equipment has an automatic storage function so that it can fully record relevant production data (such as process parameters, production status and more) during the production process, and data concatenation is a feature of the central database.

  Since most Taiwanese manufacturers are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), they don’t have long-term research and capital resources and so lack diverse applications for their smart manufacturing like those abroad. For the time being, these SMEs remain limited within the factory; at most, they link information to the ERP(enterprise resource planning) or MES (manufacturing execution system). Moreover, technology development resources are largely concentrated in scientific research institutes and a small number of enterprises, which mostly develop independent platforms, fail to build economies of scale and related synergies. With international trends such as the Sino-US trade war, COVID-19, and net zero carbon emissions, they have provided Taiwan with the opportunity to promote smart manufacturing transformation. To break loose from current industrial development issues, Taiwan can, however, refer to foreign experiences. The government can also help create demand through legislating industrial incentive policies to encourage enterprises to invest in smart manufacturing transformation.