Jeonbuk-Style Smart Factory Drive Accelerates as Innovation Project Results Are Shared

[Financial News | Jeonju = Reporter Kang In] Jeonbuk State held a results-sharing meeting on the Jeonbuk-style Smart Manufacturing Innovation Project at Hyojin Industry in Iksan on the 29th. The initiative is the nation's first region-led smart factory project.
About 200 people attended the meeting, including Lee Won-taek, Governor of Jeonbuk State; Park Seung-hee, president in charge of CR at Samsung Electronics; and Choi Jeong-ho, mayor of Iksan. They shared the project's achievements and best practices from the past three years, along with the results of collaboration with Samsung Electronics.
The project is a public-private partnership model that Jeonbuk State was the first metropolitan local government to institutionalize as a policy initiative, drawing on Samsung Electronics' manufacturing innovation expertise. Manufacturing innovation experts from large companies served as mentors, working with employees on-site to make their work environments more convenient and safer. The project also provided training for specialists, as well as technology and market access support.
From 2024 through September this year, a total of 189 companies in Jeonbuk State had built smart factories. Of these, 172 were at the basic stage, collecting data with basic sensors instead of relying on handwritten records, while 17 were at the advanced stage, analyzing data using technologies such as IoT and AI. An analysis of the 133 companies that completed construction in 2024 and 2025 found that productivity rose by an average of 74% and quality improved by 51%. Logistics improved by 35%, while costs fell by 27%. Twenty-five beneficiary companies newly hired about 130 young people.
Hyojin Industry in Iksan, where the meeting was held, established a system to collect production data from its automated cutting equipment and monitor performance in real time. This has enabled the company to respond quickly to defects in the production process and problems at the worksite.
Building on the achievements of the three-year project, Jeonbuk State plans to launch Jeonbuk-style 2.0 from 2027 to 2029. The initiative will support companies at each stage of growth, from process improvement and standardization before the introduction of smart factories to digital transformation and AI adoption. It also aims to nurture companies that can apply AI to robots and equipment as candidates for physical AI, turning Jeonbuk into a testbed for AI-based autonomous manufacturing.
Lee Won-taek, Governor of Jeonbuk State, said, "We will go beyond simply supporting digital transformation and spare no effort to innovate manufacturing processes, distribution management and management mindsets so that we can strengthen manufacturing competitiveness."


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