Holistic approach to control

GM´s Shanghai facility is designed from the ground up with a control system built from scratch. Not every facility has the luxury of designing a production control system from the ground up. The majority of automotive OEMs and suppliers have plants with legacy production and control systems that are upgraded piecemeal. Outmoded controllers running on proprietary networks mean that production control is often carried out in islands of automation rather than adopting a holistic view. So, when presented with the opportunity to build a control system from scratch, GE ensured that the system it implemented at its production facility in the Pudong area of Shanghai was as integrated as the market could offer