Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the Reference Guidelines for Advancing Digital Transformation in Key Industries Through Scenario-Based and Map-Based Approaches, 2025 Edition. Focusing on 14 key industries, the guidelines draw a scenario navigation map for enterprise digital transformation, helping China's manufacturing sector move from scattered exploration toward systematic advancement.

Manufacturing is the foundation of the nation and the cornerstone of national strength. The Central Economic Work Conference for 2025 put forward new requirements around adhering to innovation-driven development and accelerating the cultivation and expansion of new growth drivers. This points the way for the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing sector. Promoting the intelligent, green, and integrated development of manufacturing and building a modern industrial system with advanced manufacturing as its backbone will further consolidate the material and technological foundation of Chinese modernization.

At present, digital technology is accelerating innovation and increasingly integrating into every field and every stage of economic and social development, profoundly reshaping the production methods, organizational forms, and business models of manufacturing. At the same time, industrial structure upgrading, improved manufacturing efficiency, and optimized supply quality help expand domestic demand in manufacturing and create new economic growth points. This is also an important lever for building a new development pattern in which the domestic cycle is the mainstay and the domestic and international cycles reinforce each other. Using digital technology to carry out comprehensive and whole-chain transformation of traditional industries and giving full play to its amplifying, superimposing, and multiplying effects on economic development can inject strong new momentum into the sustained and healthy development of manufacturing.

The essence of manufacturing digital transformation is to take data as the key driving factor and use digital technology to carry out digital transformation, intelligent upgrading, and networked collaboration across every link including research and development design, production and manufacturing, business management, and market services, thereby reshaping the manufacturing system and evolving the industrial ecosystem. Its core goal is to build new quality productive forces and improve the quality, efficiency, and competitiveness of manufacturing. After years of effort, China's manufacturing transformation and upgrading have achieved historic results. Industrial internet has grown from scratch and developed vigorously, and has been widely applied across 45 major categories of the national economy. There are more than 340 influential industrial internet platforms, connecting nearly 100 million sets of equipment. The numerical control rate of key processes in major industries and the penetration rate of digital R and D design tools have risen significantly. The construction of smart factories and digital workshops has achieved notable results, and industrial resilience has been further strengthened. However, compared with the requirements of high-quality development and the global frontier of manufacturing, China still faces many challenges in achieving the goal of becoming a manufacturing powerhouse. Deepening digital transformation and promoting high-quality manufacturing development must be advanced as a systematic project, with continuous efforts and breakthroughs in several key areas.

The foundation of manufacturing digital transformation lies in solid technological self-reliance and industrial independence. Whether it is breaking through industrial software for design simulation, industrial control, and production management, or developing key hardware such as high-performance CNC machine tools, industrial chips, sensors, and robots, China must maintain control of key core technologies. To that end, it is necessary to give full play to the advantages of the new nationwide system, strengthen the leading role of national strategic scientific and technological forces, deepen collaborative innovation among industry, academia, research, and application, and organize joint efforts to tackle common technologies, frontier fields, and bottleneck links in manufacturing digitalization. It is also necessary to make forward-looking arrangements for digital technologies that deeply integrate with manufacturing, and accelerate their industrial deployment and iterative application. Efforts should focus on building an independently controllable industrial software system and promoting the software-based encapsulation and reuse of knowledge and experience in basic processes, control methods, and algorithm models.

As a key driving factor in digital transformation, the full release of data potential depends on the dual support of improved infrastructure and a standardized governance system. Coordinated development of data infrastructure should be strengthened, including 5G plus industrial internet, data spaces, and computing power centers, and their inclusive coverage should be expanded to industrial parks, industrial clusters, and small and medium-sized enterprises. It is also necessary to explore the construction of a governance system covering the entire life cycle of data development and utilization, cultivate enterprise awareness and capability in data management, and ensure that data is well managed, actively used, and smoothly circulated. Faster improvement is needed in systems and standards covering data classification and grading, rights confirmation and authorization, security review, and risk assessment. On the premise of safeguarding data security, trade secrets, and personal privacy, compliant and efficient data sharing and value mining should be promoted along industrial chains and between industry, academia, research, and application. Through the dual-wheel drive of strengthening foundations and strengthening governance, the data foundation of manufacturing digital transformation can be truly consolidated, the multiplier effect of data factors can be activated, and manufacturing can be empowered to improve quality and efficiency.

Application scenarios are the testing ground for realizing technological value and the catalyst for industrial upgrading. China's manufacturing sector has the unique advantage of a complete range of categories and rich scenarios. Based on this, it can sort out and promote typical digital application scenarios by industry and field around core demands such as quality improvement, cost reduction, efficiency enhancement, greening, and safety. Taking scenarios as the core lever, complex digital transformation tasks can be broken down into specific business units and embedded with four key supporting elements, data factors, knowledge models, software tools, and talent skills, to form a chart-based standardized framework. By breaking through the barriers between the language of industrialization and the language of digitalization, enterprises can follow the map to precisely identify their current stage, match suitable scenarios, and allocate necessary resources. Through the path of scenario guidance, pilot demonstration, and replication and promotion, enterprises' endogenous motivation can be stimulated.

Enterprises are the main force in digital transformation, and integrated innovation and coordinated transformation among large, medium-sized, and small enterprises will release powerful energy. On the one hand, it is necessary to guide and support leading enterprises and industry champions to build industry benchmarks and replicable transformation solutions based on their own practice, and use their influence to drive related enterprises along the industrial chain and supply chain to realize chain-based transformation. Platform enterprises should be encouraged to give full play to their technological and ecosystem advantages and provide compact, lightweight, fast, and accurate solutions, thereby lowering the cost of digital transformation for small and medium-sized enterprises. On the other hand, special support policies should be implemented for SMEs, providing public services such as consulting and diagnostics, special training, and financial support, in order to address the real difficulties of not daring to transform, not knowing how to transform, and transforming in the wrong way.

In addition, talent is the primary resource driving manufacturing development. Cooperation among enterprises, universities, and research institutes should be strengthened to build a digital talent cultivation system, optimize curriculum design, and train composite and innovative talents who understand both manufacturing technology and digital technology. At the same time, the evaluation and incentive mechanism for manufacturing digital transformation talent should be continuously improved, and a talent pool for manufacturing digital transformation should be established to provide strong talent support for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Source: Guangming Daily