Evolution of Anhui's manufacturing sector
Inland province has emerged as one of China's fastest-rising production centers
Invisible factory manager
A short drive away, another old industrial company is confronting the same shift from a different direction.
Anhui Heli Co traces its history to 1958 and is one of China's biggest forklift manufacturers. In 2025, it sold 394,500 vehicles and generated more than 19.8 billion yuan in revenue, according to the company.
For decades, a factory like Heli's depended heavily on something difficult to write into a balance sheet: human experience.
An experienced production manager knew which batch of parts was late. A veteran technician could hear that a machine sounded wrong. Dispatchers walked the shop floor asking where bottlenecks had formed.
Now much of that information is being pulled into what Heli describes as a "digital brain".
Working with China Telecom Anhui and other technology partners, Heli has deployed a manufacturing operations management platform that links data from people, machines, materials, production and quality systems.
Yin Bin, assistant director of the information technology department at Anhui Heli, said: "Through this digital brain, we can connect data across the whole production process. A forklift can now leave a digital trail showing when production began, which robot welded it and what current and voltage were used during the process."
"The data itself tells us what is happening," Yin said.
On one frame-welding line, 12 welding robots and a handling robot automatically identify, move, clamp, weld and calibrate parts. Labor efficiency has risen by more than 80 percent, Heli said. On a mast-welding line, it has increased by more than 60 percent.
The broader factory has also been moving from reactive management toward predictive management — using connected equipment, industrial networks and AI to detect abnormal conditions earlier and coordinate production more closely.
The worker has not disappeared. Neither has the factory manager. But some of the constant checking, chasing and coordinating that once happened through footsteps and phone calls is migrating into software. The machines are still noisy. The "manager" coordinating them is increasingly invisible.
