What is Chinese medicine?

In the White Paper on Intelligent Manufacturing Capability Maturity Model (1.0) issued by China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute (CESI), the maturity of intelligent manufacturing capabilities is divided into five levels: planned, standardized, integrated, optimized, and lead-level.

At present, the intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine is mainly in the stage of planning, standardization (ie, digitization and standardization) and integration, and will also develop to the optimization level and the leading level in the future.

China is a big country in the Chinese medicine industry and a major producer of Chinese medicine equipment. It ranks among the top in the world in terms of the number of enterprises, product varieties, specifications and production. In addition, the implementation of the Made in China 2025 strategy will further promote the transformation of traditional Chinese medicine industry to high-end manufacturing and intelligent manufacturing.

It can be said that under the influence of factors such as market and policy, the transformation and upgrading of the Chinese medicine industry is imminent. To accelerate the development of the industry, Chinese medicine companies should play a more catalytic role. In addition, the extensive use of tacit knowledge plays an important role in the quality assurance of traditional Chinese medicine in the process of planting, harvesting, machining and processing.

Some experts said that at every stage of the production transition period, Chinese medicine enterprises should strike a balance between quality, cost and benefit according to their actual needs. Then promote the integration and development of traditional Chinese medicine production with advanced pharmaceutical technology and advanced information technology in a timely manner. Meanwhile, accumulate and improve the corresponding level of intelligent manufacturing.

However, in light of the current actual situation, Chinese medicine companies are still facing great challenges in the development of intelligent manufacturing. In the field of subdivision, such as the production of preparations, the process is intermittent, the material flow is mainly artificial, and the equipment cannot be interconnected so the information is isolated. Due to its weak foundation, industrial upgrading faces more complex technical and management challenges.

On the whole, such as the natural properties of traditional Chinese medicine raw materials, according to the researchers, the natural properties of traditional Chinese medicine raw materials determine the uncertainty of the quality of traditional Chinese medicine raw materials, the complexity of material basis and production process, and the ambiguity between the quality standard of traditional Chinese medicine and clinical efficacy.

All of the above factors have made it difficult to analyze the quality transfer rules of traditional Chinese medicine production, which has increased the difficulty of quality control of traditional Chinese medicine manufacturing. However, traditional Chinese medicine products are the value carriers of intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicines. Improving the consistency, controllability and reliability of traditional Chinese medicine products is the core goal of intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine.

Therefore, the industry suggests that if Chinese medicine companies want to go further on the road of intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine, they must take the Chinese medicine manufacture mother plant construction as the carrier, with the production of large data as the grasp, give full play to the advantages of resource endowment. Through the effective combination of intelligent manufacturing technology and large-scale batch production, develop technological intelligence, and form a unique intelligent manufacturing capability.

The author has learned that some enterprises focus on breaking through the key technical bottlenecks of high efficiency, energy saving, intelligence, informatization and linkage of traditional Chinese medicine extraction, concentration, drying equipment and slice machinery, aiming at the low efficiency, high energy consumption, high pollution, low automation and intelligence of traditional Chinese medicine production equipment, and the difficulty of linkage production.

At present, the company has successfully created a number of representative high-end Chinese medicine equipment, and significantly reduced equipment energy consumption, improve production efficiency, and provided a strong support for comprehensively promoting the deep integration of industry intelligence and information.

There are also enterprises relying on intelligence and information technology to build a smart factory of Chinese medicine formula granules integrating intelligent equipment, warehousing logistics management, automation control, process analysis, information management, enterprise resource management and other technologies to promote the intelligent production of traditional Chinese medicine. 

Intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is not only the realization of intellectualization in the manufacturing process, but also the whole life cycle from drug design, research and development to production, and from raw materials to products, to the comprehensive intellectualization of the TCM industry chain of supply and sale. At present, only some enterprises have realized informatization and digitization within the scope of local business. The majority of small and medium-sized Chinese medicine enterprises have not yet implemented intelligent manufacturing planning.

However, it is certain that the intelligent manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine industry will fundamentally improve the efficiency of industrial knowledge generation, inheritance and utilization, liberate people’s mental and physical strength, accelerate the pace of innovation, and push the traditional Chinese medicine industry into a new development stage characterized by high quality, high efficiency, green, flexible and open.