Manufacturing at a distance

　　隔离式制造

　　Still made in China

　　仍是中国制造

　　Covid-19 is changing factories. Some of the new ways of doing things will be permanent

　　新冠肺炎正在改变工厂。一些新的工作方式将成为常态

　　MANY OF THE robots on factory floors operate in cages, fenced off from their human colleagues. The separation prevents the machines, in the routine and mindless pursuit of a bolt, from crushing the leg, hand or chest of a worker who happens to get in the way.

　　工厂车间里的许多机器人都在笼子里工作，与它们的工人同事隔开。这种隔离是为了避免机器在按部就班地寻找零部件时，撞到碰巧挡了道的工人的手脚或胸口。

　　Now factory operators do not just need to keep human workers at a safe distance from robots; they have to keep them at a safe distance from each other, too. In China, fences between workers are among the measures bringing factories back to life.

　　现在，工厂经营者不仅要让工人和机器人保持安全距离，还必须让工人彼此之间也保持安全距离。在中国，在工人之间设置栅栏成了让工厂复产的措施之一。

　　Most Chinese factories are now back to operating at around 80% of capacity. Some are pushing 100%. Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer which assembles the majority of Apple’s iPhones in China, says that with the help of tests for the virus and chest x-rays it has been able to get all its operations on the mainland back up and running with no risk to the health of its workers. In a call to investors on April 1st it reported that it was on target to provide Apple with all the 5G iPhones it needs for the launch of the device this autumn.

　　大多数中国工厂现已复产，恢复到正常产能的80%左右。有些工厂正在努力实现100%复产。在中国组装了大部分苹果iPhone手机的台湾代工企业富士康表示，通过病毒检测和胸透检查，在中国大陆的所有业务已经在不危及员工健康的情况下恢复运营。在4月1日的投资者电话会议中，富士康表示正按计划生产，将能为苹果足量供应于今年秋季推出的5G版iPhone。

　　Many of the measures that made China’s great reopening possible were boring-but-important changes to existing protocols; more hygiene measures, more separation between workers, and screening (companies in China and elsewhere are trying to get their hands on a lot of tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection).

　　中国得以大规模复工复产的许多措施都是对既有工作规范做出的枯燥但重要的改动：更多卫生措施、拉大工人间隔，以及筛查(中国和其他地方的公司都在尽量实施大量新冠病毒感染检测)。

　　But there has also been investment in automation and remote operation that has brought forward improvements not expected for some time to come. Anna Shedletsky, the boss of Instrumental, a firm which uses machine learning to help manufacturers improve their processes, says that in electronics manufacturing “We’re going to do five years of innovating in the next 18 months.”

　　但在自动化和远程操作方面也有所投资，带来了原本预计还要一段时间才能出现的改进。使用机器学习帮助制造业改进流程的公司Instrumental的老板安娜(Anna Shedletsky)表示，在电子制造方面，“我们要在未来18个月内完成五年的创新。”

　　Modern high-tech factories already have systems in place to control who comes in or out and what they have on their person. The procedures which identify workers now take their temperatures, too. Many factories are also relying on a variety of “health code” apps developed by provincial Chinese governments. These run through portals inside WeChat and AliPay, two payment apps, to determine the worker’s health status and travel history. Willy Shih of Harvard Business School, who studies Chinese factories and supply chains, says such techniques were developed during the outbreaks of SARS and H1N1, in 2003 and in 2009, respectively. “Normally you change out of street clothes and go through a security check,” he says. “In many respects the [new protocols] are a small incremental addition.”

　　现代高科技工厂早已配备了控制人员进出的系统，同时也可检测他们随身携带的物品。这些识别工人身份的程序中现在也加上了测量体温。许多工厂还依赖中国各省政府开发的各种“健康码”应用。健康码通过两大支付平台(微信和支付宝)中的入口使用，用来确定工人的健康状况和旅行史。哈佛商学院研究中国工厂和供应链的(Willy Shih)表示，这些方法是在2003年非典和2009年H1N1疫情期间开发的。“通常你要换下自己的衣服，然后通过安检。”他说。“在很多方面，(新的程序)只是稍微增加了些内容而已。”

　　Once inside the factory, the changes required depend on what the workers are making. Those in car factories are already spread out and do not need much repositioning—though some manufacturers are using fences to enforce separation. The parts the workers handle are regularly disinfected as they pass through the assembly process, says Tu Le, a consultant. At a phone factory in Guangdong province, though, changes in layout are immediately apparent. Workers no longer cluster around each step of the assembly process in dense U-shaped cells; instead they are spread out, increasing their safety at the expense of some speed.

　　进入到工厂里头后的改变则取决于工人生产的是什么产品。在车厂里，工位原本就比较分散，不需要太多重新部署，但也有一些制造商用栅栏强制隔开工人。咨询师乐途(音译)说，工人经手的零部件会在装配线上不断消毒。不过，在广东一家手机厂，工位布局的变化一目了然。工人不再按每个装配步骤分批挤在U型单元里，而是分散开来，牺牲一些速度以换取更高的安全性。

　　Making it better

　　精益求精

　　The obsessive and precise standards of modern global production make it comparatively easy for factories to adapt in such ways. However well a production process is adapted, though, things can still all go to pot if less cautious suppliers have to shut down and the parts the factory needs from them run out. As a result factories around the world have been stockpiling ferociously since news of the outbreak broke in January, going against the nature of modern just-in-time supply chains.

　　现代全球化生产严苛而精确的标准使得工厂相对容易适应这种改变。然而，无论生产流程调适得多好，一旦有供应商出现疏漏而被迫关停，导致工厂所需的零部件断供，一切努力仍可能付之东流。正因如此，1月疫情爆发的消息传出后，世界各地的工厂开始疯狂囤货，完全背离了现代“及时”型供应链的特性。

　　Another problem is new product introduction (NPI), a vital part of the business cycle in the electronics industry which is roughly 10% of Chinese manufacturing by value. During NPI, engineers from companies abroad fly in to tweak and tune the development of new products—something which today’s all-but-closed Chinese border makes impossible.

　　另一个问题是新产品导入(NPI)，这是电子产业商业周期的关键一环，而电子产业约占中国制造业产值的10%。在新产品导入期间，海外公司的工程师要飞过来微调和优化新产品的开发——如今在中国几乎完全关闭边境的情况下已经不可能了。

　　This has afforded Ms Shedletsky’s company a nice opportunity. The firm sells a system which uses machine learning to examine images of every single item a factory makes at every single stage of its assembly. It lets users explore the causes of any flaws, thereby increasing yields and reducing wasted time, money and materials. The amount of detail captured by the system also lets engineers from client companies inspect and manage production from halfway around the world—which under covid-19 has become a primary selling-point.

　　这对Shedletsky的公司来说是一个良机。这家公司销售的系统采用机器学习，检查工厂组装线上每个环节生产的每件物品的图像。这让该系统的用户可以探查任何缺陷发生的原因，从而提高良品率，减少时间、金钱和物料的浪费。该系统采集的大量细节也可以让客户公司的工程师在地球另一端参与生产的检查和管理——在新冠肺炎疫情期间这已成为一个主要卖点。

　　Engineers at P2i, a client of Instrumental’s which makes nanotechnology coatings for electronic devices, can sit at their headquarters in Oxford inspecting work at factories in China at a level of detail previously only accessible to someone on the spot. (Some of them have done the same while quarantined in hotels just down the road from the plant in question.) Neal Harkrider, the firm’s chief operating officer, says it has started connecting its manufacturing equipment to the internet, so that it can make the adjustments that Instrumental’s system recommends remotely, closing the developmental loop.

　　Instrumental的客户P2i专为电子器件提供纳米涂层技术。现在该公司的工程师可以坐在牛津的总部检视中国工厂里的生产状况，而这样细致的检查以往只能在现场进行。(一些工程师在那家工厂附近的酒店里隔离时也曾这么操作过。)公司的首席运营官(Neal Harkrider)表示，公司已经开始将生产设备连上互联网，以便根据Instrumental系统的建议远程做出调整，实现了闭环开发。

　　There is a near miraculous irony to the idea that the nanotechnology embodied in the protuberant proteins and RNA programming of SARS-CoV-2 is changing, through its decidedly macroscopic effects on human health and the world economy, the processes of a company like P2i that fashions its own wares back down on the virus’s own scale. But in truth it is merely accelerating a transformation that the world’s manufacturers were undergoing already. As products become more complex and their components more minute, there comes a point when human hands and eyes cease to be useful instruments for their assembly.

　　新冠病毒的突起蛋白和RNA编码体现了一种纳米技术，它在宏观层面上给人类健康和世界经济带来了明确的影响，从而改变了P2i这类公司的生产流程，而P2i的工艺本身正是在类似病毒的级别上进行，真是一种不可思议的讽刺。但事实上，这只不过是加速了世界制造业早已开始的变革而已。随着产品越来越复杂、组件越来越微小，到了一定程度之后，人的手和眼在组装产品时已无用武之地。

　　For a glimpse of that future, look at the world’s most complex manufacturing operations, those that produce semiconductors. Chip factories have hardly felt the impact of covid-19 at all. This is because laying down nanometre-scale transistors by the billion is far too complex for human minds to contemplate, let alone human hands to achieve, and so humans do not need to gather together on a shop floor to do it.

　　要一窥未来的面貌，只需看看世界最复杂的制造工艺——半导体生产。芯片工厂几乎完全没有受到新冠肺炎的冲击。这是因为要排布数十亿计的纳米级晶体管实在过于复杂，远非人类大脑所能想象，更不用说靠人手来实现，所以根本不需要工人聚集在车间里工作。

　　The world’s leading contract manufacturer of semiconductors, Taiwan’s TSMC, runs its most advanced facilities from central control rooms in which humans manage machines that move the silicon being engineered around in a hyperclean environment that human workers rarely visit. In Wuhan, ground zero for the pandemic, Yangtze Memory Technologies, a Chinese chip company that is a darling of Beijing, kept operating throughout the months of lockdown which ended in April 8th, its controlling engineers shuttled in on special trains.

　　台湾的台积电是全球领先的半导体代工厂，其最先进的工厂都是通过中央控制室来操控运行的。员工在中控室操纵机器在超洁净环境中加工硅器件，鲜少需要进入生产环境。中国芯片公司长江存储科技位于这次疫情的震中武汉市，作为备受北京重视的企业，它在4月8日之前武汉封城的几个月里一直保持运作，其控制工程师乘坐专门列车分批进入。

　　For the manufacture of chips and screens, all-but-complete automation is unavoidable. In other contexts, the cost of re-engineering systems and buying new kit has kept people in the loop and on the floor. They will not vanish overnight. But covid-19 has provided a new spur for more factories to approach the machinic perfection of chip foundries. That new distancing between human and machine is likely to long outlive the disease itself.

　　就芯片和屏幕制造而言，接近完全自动化是不可避免的。在其他领域，重新设计系统以及购买新设备都需要成本，因此在工艺流程和生产车间里仍然保留了人类员工。他们不会在一夜之间消失。但新冠肺炎给更多工厂提供了新的动力去追求芯片厂那种完美的机械化。疫情终会过去，但人与机器之间进一步的疏远应该会长久持续下去。

　　注：双语全文源自EC0

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