SMART MANUFACTURING FOR INDUSTRY 4.0 - YYC

Leading the Smart Manufacturing in Taiwan

Extending 60 kilometers along the Mt. DaDu foothills in central Taiwan’s Taichung City, the density of machinery industry here is the highest around the world. Most of the ‘heroes’ of Taiwan's machine tool industry gathered in this corridor. The machine tool industry alone like metal cutting, lathes, milling, grinding, stamping press and laser cutting, it created more than US$15 billion as the annual turnover and made Taiwan become the world's seventh largest machine tool manufacturing country and the fourth largest export country.

However, in recent four years, the turnover of Taiwan machine tool industry has declined again and again, mainly due to industry downturn, especially exports to the mainland market has declined.

Machinery Industry Stays Ahead and Challenges the Trillion Turnover

From the machine tool to the overall machinery industry, the turnover in nearly five years has exceeded NT$900 billion and even grown to NT$990 billion in 2016. Nevertheless, it still needs the last push to achieve the trillion.

So how can we help the machine tool industry break out? How to let the machinery industry be on the trillion throne? ‘Smart Manufacturing’ may be a weapon.

The largest high precision rack manufacturer in Taiwan, Yuan Yi Chang(YYC) Machinery Co., Ltd., is located here in the field in Wuri, Taichung City. The racks produced by YYC has exported to more than 20 countries. Every time YYC goes to Taichung high-speed rail station to pick up customers, the vehicles which are sent are either Bentley luxury car or Maserati sports car in order to welcome cusotmers.

The general manager of YYC, Mr. George Chen, who looks gentle and honest said ‘I am trying to make a “smart factory”’. The annual turnover of YYC is NT$300 million but he still determined to make a bold investment of NT$50 million to transform. Recently, he is very satisfied with Smart Inspection Machine which was developed together with Industrial Technology Research Institute and he is quite looking forward to the automatic uploading and downloading operations which will be officially launched in June this year.

The precision rack produced by YYC is an important and essential part of the tool machine. Because each customer’s rack size is different, the product cannot be standardized inspecting. In addition, manual sampling inspection doesn’t work as well. Every rack is one meter long and fifteen kilograms. It always takes QC staff half an hour to write a report. In order to assure quality, YYC staffs have to work overtime every day and they may mismeasure the rack. Mr. Chen said this is his pain as they always have to catch up the delivery.

But with the Smart Inspection System, everything changed. The laser machine engraves the QR Code on the rack, and it takes only two minutes for the computer to test whether the quality of rack is qualified. Customers also can scan the QR Code with smart phones, then the measurement results will be shown on the phone screen. Thus, customers can check it at any time.

Now almost 75% of the machinery industry manufacturers have already worked on Smart Manufacturing’ for the Industry 4.0 as YYC Machinery has been doing.