Insight

For over 29 years Easylink Industrial has been successful in providing high-quality fasteners and services to the automotive, electronics and electrical industries, thanks to its President Lerry Tsao being a strong believer in continuous improvement and innovation.

Easylink Industrial Co Ltd was founded in 1992 as a trading company in Kaohsiung – the largest industrial city in Taiwan. In 2005, based on customers’ requirements for better service, Easylink started to build its own factory along with a TAF laboratory, which has since been awarded ISO 14001 and IATF 16949 certification.

Today, the company has two factories in Taiwan and one factory in Vietnam, as well as a branch office in Ningbo, China, as a sourcing agent. This has enabled Easylink to specialise in the export and manufacturing of screws, nuts and fasteners for automotive and electrical industries around the world.

From the very beginning ‘innovation’ was a way of life for the company and embedded in Easylink’s philosophy and culture. “At the very start I looked at what could set us apart from other fastener manufacturers and how we could enhance our manufacturing, quality and service to our customers,” explains Mr Tsao. “I decided that both innovation and continuous improvement were the key factors to our future success and this has proven to be the case.” 

This commitment to continuous improvement is underlined by the company building a new state of the art manufacturing facility in Kaohsiung in 2018. “As a high-quality fastener manufacturer we wanted to make sure we changed with the times and continued to use modern technology,” mentions Mr Tsao. “This helped create the vision for the new facility and that vision became a reality in 2018.”

The new Easylink manufacturing facility includes production lines that are fed automatically from an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) warehouse. “The AS/RS is connected to the plant floor with computerised robotic ‘buggies’ that deliver materials,” explains Mr Tsao. “This means finished products can be picked up by buggies and stored for secondary processes and brought back to the factory floor, as and when they are needed.” This is possible thanks to every step of the production being monitored via barcoding – right up until the product is completed and ready to ship to the customer.

Easylink also produces its own tooling in-house, which it states helps bring quality consistency and production efficiency. Another key area for the company is the quality of the processes and products, with periodic quality inspections maintained via digitalisation. For instance, in-process inspection data is downloaded wirelessly in ‘real time’ to the SPC system, which helps minimise data entry errors and ensures process control. Additionally, Easylink has a laser and optical sorting engineering team that builds all the optical sorting machines used – once again ensuring quality, integrity and guaranteeing the company meets the PPM requirements of its customers. For instance, in 2020 the optical sorting engineering team built 360 degree models that can view critical dimensions from all sides and angles.

Easylink also continues to invest in new technologies to increase the quality yield rate and is looking to utilise the Industrial Internet (IoT) by networking its production lines – enabling data analysis and early warning mechanisms to reduce downtime. By using software simulation and 3D modelling, the engineering team can also establish a knowledge base for machine adjustment.

“Easylink strives to continuously improve its competitiveness through ‘smart’ manufacturing, such as automated factory systems, a tooling control system, IoT data collection with production alert system, product control system, material control system, spot digitalised inspection and 360º view optical sorting,” states Mr Tsao. “We have developed a digitised knowledge database to capture the expertise of our senior engineers and our employees can draw upon this to facilitate the rapid turnaround of customer designs.”

 “In this unusual time, there is much uncertainty in product usage and forecasts. By maintaining safety stock, Easylink is able to bridge this uncertainty and help ensure seamless supply to our customers’ factories. With this pandemic, customer expectations have also shifted towards the world of online services. By using the order status and shipment tracking system that our website provides, customers can obtain the needed data at any time to increase customer satisfaction levels.”

Mr Tsao concludes: “Our outstanding performance and capabilities is underlined by numerous successful audits. We will remain focused on innovation and continuous improvement going forward, with all our employees committed to excellence.”