Find out why and how presidents of MOBIO exhibitors have started "INNOVATION and CHALLENGE" through the special interview.
"Meet the President" No.53 is Mr. Shirooka of TAIYO PARTS CO., LTD. (Read on details)

- Metal parts, housing equipment and apparatus

One stop shop to offer design, manufacturing, processing and assembling

Major machinery companies and housing equipment companies consider Taiyo as the indispensable partner, who provides aluminum die cast parts, rubber parts and plastic parts. At aluminum parts business, it is capable to design mold, cast, press, machine, trim, assembly for various sizes. Especially its "UNIT DIE SYSTEM" (called eco-die cast system) is patented and saves mold cost and operation cost drastically. Shirooka clearly said his business strategy, "We are the late comer in manufacturing market. Therefore from the corporate establishment I challenged to cultivate exclusiveness as a factory, considering conditions to set the company to be selected by customers. It ends up with present five business principles and those uniqueness and differentiation from others enable customer to leave business to us. They believe that Taiyo can do it!"

1) Process any materials by any manufacturing technology

2) Production expertise from unit production, unit combination to assembly

3) Unit die system to save manufacturing cost and to run extremely small lot

4) Off shore facility to supply to global market

5) Engineering department to propose unit from the scratch

A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.

▲UNIT DIE SYSTEM - Saves mold cost by half, allows extremely small lot run from 50 pcs

Taiyo's unit die system (Eco-die-casting) is widely known in the industries as the very unique technology, that is considered to be ideal for small lot production run such as medical equipment components and its demand is increasing. Companies notice its advantage that the exclusive mold is made from the scratch at much less cost than machined mold cost.

"Twenty years ago when I proposed to kick off this development, I received negative response from all members. I knew it was quite natural because we had no such a request, had to invest huge amount of money and to assign dedicated members. However, if my proposal was turned down, we could have never accomplished today's business," Shirooka said. He had been firmly convinced that there should be needs for "extremely small lot run" between prototyping and small lot run. He persuaded continuously that if Taiyo could offer such an assistance to companies, they would request Taiyo for prototyping and small lot production run, and started the project. He came up with the idea to apply mass production technology to small lot run by creating the mold base unit that is commonly used and to insert the custom-made small mold, that saves customer's mold cost tremendously and installed equipment step by step.

Shirooka said, "Starting the project, we had noticed that making mold would be made by everybody but die casting process was obstacle, requiring advanced engineering. That's why nobody had every tried. And I thought we would do it! 15 years ago we had assigned the unit die system section to run exclusively small lot only with dedicated engineers." Noticeably this organization change was quite successful to have developed further technology for customer's benefit, to reduce mold material consumption by 50%, mold processing hour by 50% and mold replacement time by 80%. Interestingly, Taiyo's positive attitude to tackle difficulties has been well known to customers and worked as a good promotional activity to other engineering.

Keep on evolving and entering ODM business

▲Dedicated ten engineers are designing mechatronics to match to customer's requirement

There is another strategy at Taiyo. "It must be seldom case to maintain ten engineers at the company of our size. So we are capable to design units, manufacturing equipment, jigs by our selves to respond to customer's demand and are ready to take order from upper process. It helps us to keep away from price only competition.," Shirooka said.

Today, Taiyo is receiving more than 100 OEM project from product designing to manufacturing. Shirooka's next goal is to enter ODM business. He understands it takes some time to establish more reliance with customers. In that case their corporate strength will assist to establish harder relationship with ODM customers.

Lastly Shirooka said, "Our goal is to make Taiyo to be selected and appointed by the society. Accomplishing this target we have challenged continuously and resulted in corporate growth. I sincerely hope as a team Taiyo, we will improve the extremely small lot production run system and develop new technologies in order to be chosen by customers."

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Interviewed on January 19, 2016