Hand tools are typical of a small number of diverse industries

Hand tool is a tool used for dismantling, assembling and repairing objects by hand. Generally, as long as the product is a combination of parts, 99% must be assembled by screws, and for the process of locking screws, hand tools are a necessity. Taiwan's hand tool industry has developed from the 1960s to the present, and has been known as the "hand tool kingdom". Although it is the invisible champion of Taiwan, the traditional industry invests in smart manufacturing, and it still cannot avoid the pressure of lack of work and technical faults.

Often for traditional industries, lack of work is one of the driving forces that force the industry to transform and upgrade, as does the hand tool industry, but in addition to lack of work, the production pattern of hand tool products themselves is also a challenge. At present, the demand for a small amount of diverse elastic production is increasing, but for the hand tool industry, a small amount of diverse production is not the future. Taking the example of Ruitai Precision, which produces socket wrenches, more than 1,000 materials can be processed into more than 3,000 sizes and lengths. There are as many as 30,000 product models, and flexible manufacturing has always been the most important issue in the industry.

Another pain point of the hand tool industry is the complicated process. You Xiangzhen, chairman of Ruitai Precision and chairman of the Hand Tool Association, said that like every sleeve is delivered to the customer from raw material manufacturing to shipment, There are 10 processes including forging, rough grinding, heat treatment, electroplating, packaging and so on. If there are 200 kinds of parts per order, there are as many as 2,000 processes for one order. The process of picking and storing is complicated. This type of production makes the industry not only tired of frequent replacement of production lines, but also a challenge for material management.

You Xiangzhen pointed out that at present, the hand tool industry has a slightly automated scale. The next thing the industry has to do is to connect the production information of the factory. For Ruitai, it has been moving towards the logistics and information flow very early. For example, the storage system cannot be regarded as a single point of warehouse management, but must consider the ability to ship to the production line. Therefore, the automatic storage system built by Ruitai is composed of more than 10,000 plastic toolboxes, each box of products represents different For size and specification, as long as the computer presses a button, the automatic transport belt is convenient to use the classification bar code, and the product is quickly sent to the packaging staff for rapid assembly and shipment.