Editor’s Note
This article highlights a traditional manufacturing firm’s successful digital transformation, supported by a government innovation program. By implementing company-wide AI training, the company achieved gains in both productivity and safety, offering a practical model for industry-wide adoption.
Company-wide AI implementation and training… Simultaneous improvement in productivity and safety.
This article features an interview with a company selected for the 2024 Industry-Customized Innovation Voucher Support Program. This government program aims to promote practical digital transformation and build in-house digital execution capabilities for companies with AI-based digital transformation needs.
Grinding is not merely a process of smoothing surfaces; it is a crucial foundational technology that determines product quality and performance. It is essential across nearly all basic industries, including shipbuilding, steel, construction, automotive, semiconductors, and medical fields. Jeil Grinding Industry, possessing top-tier domestic technology in this field, has overcome the disadvantage of its regional location and is gaining attention by actively integrating digital transformation (DX) and AI technologies into its core processes. Notably, through the ‘Innovation Voucher Support Program,’ the company is conducting data analysis and AI training, and utilizing accumulated data to drive a comprehensive transformation in process improvement and safety management systems. This company presents a model case of elevating industrial competitiveness by fusing advanced digital technology with a traditional industry. This is an interview with Park Min-ho, Chief Information Security Officer of Jeil Grinding Industry, a company selected by the Seoul Creative Economy Innovation Center.
The company name ‘Jeil’ (meaning ‘first’ or ‘best’) was created with the meaning of becoming a global No. 1 top-tier company in the grinding market.
Jeil Grinding Industry manufactures and sells grinding wheels. These grinding wheels, also called Grinding Wheels, are one of the core products used in almost all basic industries such as shipbuilding, steel, construction, automotive, semiconductors, and medical fields.
The domestic grinding wheel market is substantial, and Jeil Grinding Industry holds the top market share in Korea. Its headquarters are in Pohang, founded in 1955 with a long history, and it aims to produce high-quality products with top domestic competitiveness.
Grinding (polishing) is a process of abrading and polishing a material’s surface to create a gloss or reduce surface roughness to make it smooth. It also aims to improve the dimensional accuracy of a product by removing a very minute amount of material.
The main purposes of grinding can be summarized into four categories. First, improving surface finish by reducing the roughness of a material’s surface to create a smooth and uniform state. Second, imparting gloss to materials like metal or glass to enhance visual appeal. Third, precisely adjusting product dimensions through very fine grinding. This is an essential process in manufacturing precision parts. Finally, it is used to change surface characteristics to improve functionality such as wear resistance or corrosion resistance. For example, grinding can strengthen a metal’s surface to make it more resistant to wear or corrosion.
Jeil Grinding’s main business item is the grinding wheel, an industrial consumable primarily used for grinding and cutting operations. Grinding wheels rotate at high speed and can grind or cut hard materials like metal, glass, and ceramics.
Fine abrasive particles are evenly distributed on the surface of the grinding wheel. During rotation, these particles abrade the surface of the contacted object, machining it into the desired shape. This allows for smoothing product surfaces or precision machining into specific shapes.
The company handles grinding wheels made with various bond types: Vitrified bonds made by firing inorganic materials like clay, feldspar, and glassy substances at high temperatures; Resinoid bonds made using organic materials like phenolic resin and epoxy resin; CBN (Cubic Boron Nitride), an ultra-hard abrasive second only to diamond in hardness; and grinding wheels using Epoxy and MgO (Magnesium Oxide). These are used in centerless grinding, surface grinding, internal grinding, gear grinding, etc.
The company also provides AS (After Service), BS (Before Service) for grinding wheel manufacturing and products, and customized technical consulting for client companies.
Our company’s products are widely used across various industrial fields. In metal processing, grinding technology is essential for smoothing metal part surfaces or achieving precise dimensions. In glass processing, grinding work imparts gloss and removes scratches from glass product surfaces to enhance transparency and aesthetics. In semiconductor manufacturing, wafer polishing, especially the CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing) process, is a core step, improving semiconductor chip performance and integration density. When manufacturing optical devices like lenses and prisms, precise grinding adjusts light transmittance and refractive index to maximize device performance. In the automotive industry, grinding technology is used to impart gloss to car body surfaces or improve the precision of engine parts. In the aerospace industry, grinding parts requiring high precision, such as aircraft engines or wings, is essential. Finally, in jewelry processing, grinding is performed to impart gloss and shape raw stones into gems.
As a result of taking on this support program, employees have come to empathize with the importance and necessity of digital transformation and are actively participating in tasks like building the necessary data for DX. Also, as AI is becoming a truly important keyword in manufacturing, it is greatly helping relevant department employees understand AI and learn how to apply it to their actual work.
First, we assessed the volume of data our company possesses and the status of data infrastructure construction and technology adoption. We pre-diagnosed various problems we aimed to solve using AI technology. Simultaneously, we focused on understanding employees’ learning experience and prior knowledge in the AI field.
Subsequently, we developed a comprehensive digital customized curriculum that can directly solve problems identified in the grinding process and DX diagnosis. This enabled employees to enhance their AI knowledge and build comprehensive capabilities to solve real-world problems.
Finally, based on the accumulation of this practical knowledge and technical capability, we integrated AI-based safety management technology across the grinding industry and manufacturing processes. As a result, we are building a system that can quickly detect abnormal behavior and accidents through real-time monitoring.
Going forward, we plan to further develop the ‘Project to Enhance Work Environment Monitoring through AI Object Recognition,’ which was implemented as a verification project. As establishing a safe work environment in manufacturing sites is truly important, we plan to actively develop and introduce AI solutions capable of real-time monitoring.
In the future, we will identify problems that can be improved using data and AI and sequentially promote company-wide digital transformation to apply it across the entire business.