Over six hundred IT experts, manufacturing R&D managers, and IT vendors gathered at the two-day event to discuss the product and service innovation and digital transformation in the intelligent manufacturing era.    
Mr. Xiaogang Jia, Big Data Chief Engineer of Industry and Information Technology Department of Shanxi Province made an opening speech at the event. He said that, in the midst of this critical period of great fusion, great transformation, and great development, it is an inevitable tendency for Chinese manufacturing to widely apply digital technology for product innovation and development and improve quality through full lifecycle and whole value chain, so as to meet diversified and customized requirements and realize transformation and upgrading in enterprises.   
 Dr. Pei Huang, e-works CEO shared some trends and practice of product innovation and hot spots of applying digital technology for product innovation. He also shared some cases about digital twin, additive manufacturing, generative design, virtual debugging, augmented reality etc. “As product life cycle is getting shorter and market competition grows more cut-throat, no enterprise can complete all the innovation process alone. Manufacturers should do what they are best at and innovate through cooperation,” Huang said.
Mr. Guangxu Guo, Business Development Director of Circle Point, in his speech of “Digitalization-based integration of design technology and production” shared their all-in-one solution and implementation experience, combining customer cases in industry of aerospace and defense, transportation, and equipment manufacturing. “The overall technical architecture of Circle Point is the industrial Internet-based smart connected PLM to support the development of intelligent products” said Guo. 
    
Mr. Qingwen Tan, Vice President of Smart Engineering Technology (SET) Company pointed out that, “The research and development supported by smart engineering is of great significance in this era of digitalization and Internet of things. As a leader in intelligent engineering technology and MBD development and application, SET has built a digital "smart engineering platform" that addresses the needs of integrating engineering with production and process, mechanical with electrical, and engineering with simulation to boost the digital transformation in enterprises.”
   
Dr. Ruixia Yu, Industrial Software Business Director of Pera Global shared their domestic simulation technology and strategy in China. In response to the industrial software development in China, Pera Global launched its own general simulation software PERA SIM. “As the representative of domestic general simulation software in China, PERA SIM will do our best to enrich and improve the software functions, and will continue to make efforts in function, integration and scalability”.
    
Mr. Sigong Zhang, Process Intelligent Director of Digital Business Unit of Xi'an Shaangu Power, in his keynote speech of “Application of digital twin technology in Shaangu”, he talked about the strategic goal of Shaangu— to build a world-class intelligent green energy enterprise through the "two changes". One is to transform from a single product manufacturer to a system solution provider in distributed energy field, the other is to transform from product management to customer management, brand management and capital management. In this process, the application of digital twin technology provides strong support. He also suggested that the application of digital twin technology needs the organizational support. Enterprises should set up full-time digital twin personnel to carry out technology research as well as a set of mature business processes and standard digital delivery schemes to ensure delivery quality and schedule.
   
Mr. Lei Yang, Product Vice President of Ever Grand shared digital transformation practice in an equipment manufacturing enterprise that leveraging enterprise-level industrial iPaaS platform. He said that the essence of digital transformation is to solve the uncertainty of complex systems and optimize the efficiency of resource allocation via automatic flow of data in the world of "data + algorithm". Ever Grand has created an enterprise-level industrial iPaaS platform to provide equipment manufacturing enterprises with one-stop digital factory solution.
   
It was the 16th year that Mr. Yingsi Hong, General Manager of SIMP attended this annual event. He shared several cases leveraging SIPM/PLM platform for product research and development. SIMP has a R&D management platform that grows with enterprises, providing customers with full life cycle services and iSIPM cloud will provide continuous improvement of PLM system. 
 
In the Panel Discussion Session, the speakers gave opinions and shared their insights on issues like "the new characteristics and trends of promoting product and service innovation in manufacturing enterprises", "What are the pain points and common problems? ", and "What are the realistic scenarios and how can it be effective?" The heated discussion caused a strong resonance of the audience.
   
There was also an exhibition area that provides a bridge for face-to-face communication between manufacturers and vendors. Participants learned about the most cutting-edge technologies, products, solutions and typical applications that they employed as references for the future digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing upgrading of enterprises.
 
Two parallel sub-forums—"Digital Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAPP/CAM/CAE) Sub-forum" and "Product Innovation Process Management (PDM/PLM) Sub-forum" took place in the afternoon. The forum of "Implementation and Application of Digital Technology of Product Innovation" as well as three industry salons was held on the next day. Scholars from university and executives from manufacturing industry respectively shared their research results and innovation practices in the field of research and development there.