BY: Bob Glenn, Editor and Publisher
YOKE Industrial Corporation is well underway with two long-term strategic initiatives that will fundamentally transform how customers use their products, and how those products are made. Together, these initiatives – Digitalization and Automation – are intended to drive greater user preference for their products, enabling the business to meet growing demand while continuing to deliver consistently high-quality products. Both of these efforts support the fundamental principle around which the entire business has been built: ensuring the safety of their product’s users.
YOKE invited Wire Rope Exchange to visit their Taichung, Taiwan headquarters and manufacturing facilities for a first-hand look at what they are doing, and shared extensive insight with us into the “how?” and “why?” behind their strategies. Here’s what we learned.
Global Presence
YOKE Industrial Corporation was founded in 1985, and has steadily grown and developed into an organization that now employs more than 520 employees to serve their customers. Their products include a broad variety of lifting points, as well as lifting chain fittings (Grade 80 and Grade 100), various wire rope accessories, and a complete line of fall protection gear exclusively offered to distributors as a private label opportunity.
Their products are carried by more than 100 distributors covering 50 countries on six continents. You are also likely to find the company’s representatives hosting an extensive product display and meeting with customers and distributors at industry exhibitions all over the world. This year, those have included The Namibia Mining Expo & Conference 2024 (Namibia), ACHEMA 2024 (Germany), The Pertamina Lifting and Rigging Forum 2024 Hulu Rokan (Indonesia), Posidonia 2024 (Greece), SIMTOS 2024 (South Korea), Expominas Quito (Ecuador) and others. Recent U.S. exhibitions have included the Offshore Technology Conference, Utility Expo and AWRF PIE. YOKE is also a Gold Sponser of LiftEx2024 to be held in London on October 16-17.
Digitalization
By 2017, YOKE had grown primarily by evolving new product lines and attaining various essential certifications for those products to support their use in specific industries and applications. At this point, the company began to focus on digitalization – defined as the conversion of a business process or model through application of digital technology. That’s distinct from digitization – the conversion of analog data to a digital format – a separate but necessary precursor.
Digitalization is intended to address certain user pain points, particularly for large organizations with a vast scope of lifting equipment to keep track of. These organizations tend to have complex management systems and processes which make digitalization advantageous for integration with their internal systems. In the case of lifting equipment, many also deal with complex industry-specific regulatory compliance challenges.
Today, all of YOKE’s lifting products have an integrated chip that incorporates RFID and NFC technology for versatile connectivity. Through technology partner RiConnect, the YOKE chip enables users to access the Manufacturers Certificate of Conformity, a User Guide for the product, a step-by-step Pre-Use Check, and access to test and inspection history for the item. This data lives in the cloud, and follows the product. A user in the field has access to the data using RiConnect’s smartphone app; they simply open the app on their phone and tap the item. Separately, the tool also provides management with an integrated view of assets across the organization.
Among major organizations that have embraced this technology, one prestigious petroleum and natural gas company is presently managing more than 30,000 assets digitally, with GeoLocation providing tracking, location history, mapping integration and enhanced accountability. Meanwhile, Schlumberger is delivering digital asset management for their customers with Blue Supra capturing asset status and management of associated documents throughout their equipment and services offering.
More specifically in the lifting sector, one UK manufacturer of a variety of load monitoring equipment, has begun incorporating YOKE’s blue nano chips into select products, starting with its lines of tensile link and shackle load cells that capture data as tension is applied to lifting and marine equipment.
As these organizations benefit from more efficient business processes through digital asset management, YOKE expects enterprise scale users of lifting equipment to increasingly specify digital capability as they replace aged-out items or acquire new equipment.
Manufactured in Taiwan
While YOKE serves customers in many industries around the globe, the company’s products are all manufactured in Taiwan. Ken Lee, Sales and Products Vice President, cites two critical aspects of their operation, raw materials and workforce, that lead the company to manufacture exclusively in their home country.
He explained to us that from the standpoint of raw material, YOKE has a long relationship with their domestic supplier of steel, cooperating very closely with them to modify the composition of certain elements of the steel they use to ensure that its strength and other characteristics provide the level of performance YOKE desires. To manufacture elsewhere, he believes it would be challenging to find exactly the same composition and quality, requiring YOKE to adapt specific aspects of their manufacturing process to account for variation in input. And the cost of exporting raw materials precludes that path as well.
On the human factor aspect, Lee notes that Taiwan has a good education system and adds that “the average education level is high, so it’s very easy for us to communicate with our employees.” He goes on to explain how critical it is to engage employees throughout the organization in a process of continuous innovation. While acknowledging that in many ways the company operates in a very traditional industry, he says that innovation is essential to growth.
Al Tanzil, Managing Director, YOKE Inc. (a U.S.-based subsidiary supporting the Americas), added that the company maintains a very close relationship with National Taiwan University. The company occasionally hosts talks and presentations given by professors on material properties and other manufacturing related topics to bring YOKE’s employees new ideas and promote their engagement in continuous improvement.
Data Driven Process
Another key component of continuous innovation is measurement. “We collect a lot of data,” notes Tanzil. And that’s not a recent addition, it’s been an inherent part of how the company manufactures its products from the beginning. Of course, having a lot of data is one thing, leveraging it is another. YOKE’s engineering team, and there are more than 30 of them, are tasked with quantitatively exploring every aspect of the operation to identify prospective improvements.
Manufacturing Automation
The most significant thing one notices throughout YOKE’s manufacturing facilities is a mixture of three distinct types of work stations:
- Some are essentially manual, where workers take a series of steps using a tool or machine to directly perform a task or set of tasks.
- Some are blended, where workers might perform one or more tasks in a process before feeding the item(s) to a machine that performs one or more additional tasks in an automated manner.
- Some are fully automated, in which case inputs arrive and undergo a series of operations in which all the associated tasks are performed without any intervention by human hands. These often include an automated inspection as a final step, with passing output leaving on one path and failing output leaving on an alternate path.
These three ways of working accomplish the same thing – inputs arrive in a certain state, undergo certain transformations, and leave in a transformed state conforming to specified parameters. However, if you want to expand production volume, these processes do not scale in remotely similar ways.
A fully manual process may require additional tools or machinery to scale up, but certainly requires more workers in a direct linear relationship to volume. A fully automated process requires a one-time investment to replicate the existing automation. The hard work of designing the automation and building the first one has already been done, you just need another one.
And the more highly skilled a worker needs to be to perform a given task manually, the more challenging it becomes to scale that operation. If you have a uniquely skilled worker, a significant investment in training will be required to eventually replace them, and as a new worker gains experience, the potential exists for some variance in the quality of output. By contrast, replicating an automation replicates quality.
A Work in Progress
The varied state of production processes at YOKE today reflects work-in-progress on an initiative to completely automate production. This has been underway for a few years, and will take many more to complete. The CNC Machining department has been highly automated at a nearby facility within the same industrial park but separate from their primary location, where it was moved just over a year ago. There, 220 robots handle all the tasks previously performed by line personnel. An automated cart system brings input materials to each work station (or machine) on a table, and removes tables full of post-process items, meaning that personnel need never enter the working area of each station, enhancing safety.
This is not, however, a “turn out the lights” operation where no workers are necessary. There are a number of people working in the CNC area monitoring each machine’s performance and making adjustments where needed. Rather than replacing labor entirely, the company has been seeking to upskill workers from sometimes repetitious production roles to more engineering-oriented tasks. Certainly, automation brings efficiency, as one worker typical covers three machine workstations, and the throughput rate is considerably higher, with work that previously took one minute now needing about 40 seconds. So rather than worker versus machine, the result is a collaboration where the worker has a safer and less repetitious work environment.
Custom Designed
In order to automate each process, YOKE has actually studied the motion of line workers throughout any given process, and then worked with an automation provider to design the exact specifications for the automation of that process. As we noted before, their 30+ in-house engineering staff is once again integral to how the company operates. The result is that YOKE owns their automation, rather than having production equipment that someone else can buy off the shelf.
Notably, Taiwan is also a major hub for semiconductor manufacturing, with TSMC, AMD, and Intel all having a significant presence. This means that there are specialized vendors locally available in a variety of technology related fields, with the potential to recruit high-tech engineering talent to support the automation initiative as warranted.
So, why strive to fully automate the production process? The idea emerged in the wake of the 2020 Covid pandemic, when Ken Lee and Steven Hong, President of YOKE Industrial Corp., traveled to the United States and observed how market conditions were evolving. In short, they saw a lot of competition, but also a lot of opportunity. Hong told Lee that he believed the opportunity to grow their business to another scale was present, and that they would need larger production capacity to be well prepared.
But as Lee explained to us, they quickly found that the labor market in Taiwan had also changed dramatically. Younger workers were finding entry-level manufacturing jobs less appealing, often preferring gig work for online service providers like Uber Eats rather than full-time, in-person opportunities. “They don’t want to be managed by others,” as Lee very simply explained. In that environment, YOKE found that the kind of job that would have attracted ten good candidates in one day would languish with no one to interview for weeks.
YOKE’s leadership was already recognizing the challenge of effecting skills transfer from older to younger workers, and that only becomes more urgent if you can’t recruit a new generation of younger workers. That constraint has to be solved to have a sustainable business, let alone an expanding one, and that was where Hong was prompted to rebuild the factory with an advanced state of automation.
Where To Start?
The team at YOKE answered that question with one word: “redundancy.” Rather than working through the operation sequentially, the team identified a relatively simple task with multiple steps that are repeated many times. Assembling snap hooks in their Fall Protection line requires installing three rivets – a very repetitive task where inattention can impact quality, and requires a second worker to inspect the finished product.
Achieving success there led to thinking about the entire Lifting Product line, now well underway.
Believing is Seeing
Obviously, replacing an entire factory floor with highly automated, custom engineered machinery is a major investment. So if you calculate what the Return-on-Investment (ROI) is for a particular machine, the YOKE team acknowledges that it’s going to be a very long time. Ken Lee adds, “but it doesn’t matter. We’re playing a long game. Not a short-term game.”
The vision is that they’re building a first-generation fully automated factory, which they can duplicate for scale, and also continue to innovate. Al Tanzil adds that, “Ken has known Steven (Hong) for longer than (me), but for me, just working the past five years with Steven, he doesn’t cut corners. He will take the long way to figure out what is the best for the product itself.”
Even beyond that, the ultimate ideal would be a factory that runs without human interaction, as Lee explains. “Everything runs 24/7, it’s all by robots, it’s really futuristic. We call that ‘turn off the lights’.” He continues by noting that “Steven (Hong) always said that some CEOs or owners say ‘to see is to believe.’ Steven always said to me, ‘believe, then you can see.’ But if you don’t believe, you don’t see.”
Lee continued, “So that’s why we invest a lot of money in automation. If you try to calculate ROI it will be a very long time… we can see the future. A very weak light, very far, but we can see.”
Proof of Concept
When you’re making a long-term investments like automation and digitalization, you need checkpoints to be sure that you’re still on a path that aligns with where your customers want to go, and that you’re identifying and addressing their evolving needs. That’s an important part of why you’re likely to see YOKE at exhibitions and trade shows all over the globe, as we noted earlier.
As Al Tanzil explained to us, YOKE invests heavily in these events because, “In a very basic sense, (Steven) is a curious man. He wants to know, in each of these regions, what are his customer’s pain points. What is challenging each of these people,” and as they assemble and compare what they learn from place to place, “what kind of solution can we offer through our product?”
This is the logic that put YOKE on the path of digitalization, and continuing to talk with customers as that strategy develops constitutes what they describe as “proof of concept.” Customers from place to place may be talking about the same challenge but describing it quite differently, or using some of the same words to describe very different challenges. By assembling and assessing what they hear, YOKE can be assured that they are on the right strategic path, or refine their strategy to better solve their customers challenges.
Learn more by visiting www.yoke.net/english
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2024 Issue of Wire Rope Exchange.