In order to increase the proportion of key components manufactured in-house to better serve its clients’ needs, King Steel Machinery Co., the world’s leading shoemaking machinery brand, last year made a NT$10m investment of European-manufactured cutting tool measuring machines, NX CAD/CAM software and precision jigs and fixtures, followed by an additional over NT$30m investment in advanced, precision equipment such as high-level five-axis multi-tasking machines and small gantry processing machines from Mazak, a Japanese machinery brand with a 100-year history. The total investment is estimated to exceed NT$100m, the largest investment in equipment in the domestic shoe-making industry for many years, and will enable King Steel to progress with its whole-factory Intelligent Automation manufacturing planning. The additions will give King Steel the highest level of precision manufacturing capability in the domestic shoemaking sector, making it unrivaled in the industry here in Taiwan.
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the continued gloomy outlook for the industry, King Steel has made the determination to forge ahead and initiate a set of investments to shore up its strengths and reinforce its own core competitiveness and prepare itself for the next stage in its growth.
According to Jim Chen (陳璟浩), special assistant to King Steel chairman, competition in the shoemaking industry is increasingly fierce and, in addition to improving the quality of the product and delivery times, as well as controlling costs and raising standards of after-sales service, King Steel must also consider how best to respond to customers’ requests for assistance in improving their own production processes through automation and smart technologies. To this end, King Steel must think about how it can move beyond the simple, traditional role of supplying machinery needed in the shoemaking sector and how to become a strategic partner for its customers. It is only through constant self-improvement and recreating oneself, together with cultivation of one’s competitive edge, that the company will be able to grow together with its customers.
Jim emphasizes that King Steel has been involved in the midsole EVA and outsole rubber injection mold market for sports shoes for over 40 years, and has long been an industry leader, providing its customers with first class products and outstanding user experience, winning a strong reputation in the market and securing repeat business. With this major purchase of Mazak machinery and a range of high-end processing software, in the future the design, drafting, conversion programming, external measurement equipment, automatic tolerance compensation and high-end precision processing of various key components can all be done in a single process, effectively improving precision and greatly reducing operation times. The ratio of key components made in-house is expected to increase significantly from the present 30 percent to 45 percent in the future, further enhancing King Steel’s manufacturing efficiency, precision and reliability of the equipment, helping the company become industry-leading.
Jerry Chu, a factory manager at King Steel, says that the Mazak five-axis multi-tasking machines recently purchased by the company use advanced IoT and AI technologies which can, when combined with the newly purchased NX CAD/CAM five-axis modules, facilitate product development and help create highly efficient, high precision and high quality solutions. Big gains will be seen in the manufacture of components that originally required to be clamped 19 times, a number now drastically reduced to 4, allowing a highly complex workflow to be completed in a single process. This improvement in quality and yield enables the company to further meet the high expectations of its customers.
In addition, with the application of the new IoT and AI functionality, the equipment is now able to communicate with the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that were upgraded this year, relaying real time information about the operation of the equipment in conjunction with the system’s production management, logistics and information flow management, enabling data analysis and reinforcing supply chain management, creating a more agile workflow and laying the foundations for King Steel to become a smart plant.(Advertorial)
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