Empowering the Smart Campus: COFCO Group Enhances "Soft Power" with Ruijie Networks' Smart Factory Solution

Under the driving force of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, the construction of enterprise campus networks is no longer a simple task. It must meet requirements such as high performance and high reliability, and also needs to permeate "intelligence" into every detail of enterprise campus construction and operation, carry the user experience of innovative services, and help enterprises improve their soft power in participating in competition in the Internet era. When a giant enterprise needs to plan and build a smart campus network, how should it start? China Oil & Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) provides a reference answer.

How to Build the Soft Power of the Flagship Factory in Dongguan?

COFCO was founded in 1949. It has been listed in the Fortune Global 500 for many years and is one of the top 100 food enterprises in China. It is expected to achieve a revenue of RMB 450 billion in the 13th Five-Year Plan period. In 2016, the China National Food and Grain Corporation built a full-chain food and oil processing park in Dongguan, Guangdong, which is also the flagship factory of the group in South China.

In the evolving business landscape shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence, mobile internet, and cloud computing, COFCO sees the development of smart campuses as a key strategy for enhancing the competitiveness of modern large enterprises. To achieve this, the new campus network must deliver high-speed, reliable, and secure information collection, data transmission, centralized computing, and intelligent transaction processing capabilities. These form the essential "soft power" for the sustainable growth of the campus.

Furthermore, COFCO Group aims to integrate supplier connections, procurement logistics, production planning, and sales management within their information services infrastructure. This integration is intended to enhance standardization, efficiency, and the ability to manage exceptions. With the increasing demands and challenges from each business unit, the network requirements have also escalated. Reliable and stable network devices are essential, alongside a unified management and O&M system to ensure the smooth operation of their extensive business operations.

Food processing serves as the frontline for implementing national food safety regulations. The coordination and interconnection of DCS, MES, and ERP systems are essential for ensuring the quality of food, production safety, process control, and monitoring management. As a result, there are high demands placed on network transmission performance and security.

Building the "Soft Power" of Smart Campus Based on Service Scenarios

Ruijie Networks collaborates with COFCO Group's flagship factory to meet their specific business scenario requirements and drive further integration and innovation in the smart factory solution. With a focus on ensuring business stability and security, Ruijie exploits the functions of virtualization, security, and O&M management of core devices to build a network infrastructure platform that can adapt to various levels of needs and promote business development.

• Separate communication and data

The solution enhances service stability and security by addressing the specific needs of both production and office scenarios. The production network accommodates a large number of data sensing and control devices, requiring real-time performance despite small data volume. In contrast, the office network handles significant data traffic and can tolerate certain delays and packet loss. To optimize performance, physically separating the production and office networks is recommended to prevent resource preemption. Ruijie also recommends that COFCO group implement logical isolation of different service areas within the office network, effectively enhancing network security and guarding against security breaches.

• High-performance virtualization between devices

The core backbone network of the entire campus adopts multi-level architecture redundancy, and high-performance virtualization improves stability and ensures convenient and fast management. In terms of core device selection, in addition to the CLOS architecture that meets the enterprise performance requirements, redundant key components are also used to improve product stability. In addition, all backbone links and major devices in the network are designed with redundancy, and all backbone network devices are horizontally virtualized.

• Security authentication for user access

The security policies are configured on the intranet of the campus. Only authenticated and authorized terminals and personnel can access the network, ensuring that legitimate users can access controlled resources through the authorized network. Ruijie highlights the construction of security protection systems in the overall solution. For example, in the interconnected area, firewalls, Internet access behavior management, and intrusion detection devices are deployed to ensure the security of network egresses, preventing external hacker attacks and internal data leakage, and meeting the requirements of network security laws and regulations.

• Easy-to-use O&M platform

Firstly, the basic platform encompasses sub-systems such as the voice communication system, network switches, and wireless network system, involving a large number of devices. Any disruption to production and office services directly impacts enterprise efficiency. Therefore, fault alarming and quick fault location are crucial. Secondly, following the deployment of numerous wireless devices, it is imperative to present the quality of the wireless network simply and intuitively. To achieve this, Ruijie utilizes the O&M management platform to visualize all IT resources. This allows for the presentation of device and service logic relationships, as well as the overall health status of the entire campus network. Such visualization empowers administrators to maintain full control over the information infrastructure platform of the smart campus.

Currently, COFCO has built a series of strategic resources such as warehouses, wharves, and logistics facilities in key grain production areas around the world, including North and South America, Australia, and the Black Sea, forming a global layout of the grain and oil industry. As a rapidly developing super-large enterprise, COFCO Group is constantly exploring how to make full use of information tools to improve its competitive strength.

Xu Wei, IT department manager of COFCO Dongguan Industrial Park, said, "After multiple rounds of solution discussion and communication, we realized that Ruijie's solution based on business scenarios meets our needs. Ruijie has a thorough understanding of the current situation of the enterprise's smart factory, and is also good at planning and building network solutions. The device has been in use without any problems. In the future, we will gradually add various service systems to cope with more challenges of enterprise growth. I believe that we can do better in the future."