- Ví dụ về trường hợp khách hàng 2018/02/07 UP
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YDM CORPORATION
YDM attracts European customers with quality products
24-hour operation of AWC-equipped machines support the production
【Vol.1】
24-hour operation to increase return on investment
Since 1948, YDM has been a manufacturer and seller of medical devices, primarily of dental instruments. Back in the post-war period, dental universities were established all around the country and a number of new dentists were born. Consequently, the need for steel-made dental instruments grew. However, the market relied on import items and the dentists suffered from the unstable supply and high prices.
Against this industrial background, YDM developed dental equipment made of special stainless steel for the first time in Japan. These innovative products drove the company’s growth. Recently, YDM has been focused on orthodontic and surgical instruments. Especially with orthodontic instruments, the company has upgraded almost all of their existing products, and developed and released new ones to the market. The latter became hot-seller with a continuous annual growth of 50-80 %. The company also began to expand towards the overseas market by presenting their products at exhibitions all over Europe.
Especially their orthodontic pliers caught attention of many visitors during an exhibition held in Germany. Due to Europe’s long history of dentistry, many of the European dentists have a good eye for dental instruments and high-quality expectations. However, YDM met these challenging quality standards and gained high reputation for their products. As a result, inquiries from Europe sky-rocketed.
The company has been fostering its development, technology, and quality management skills for a long time. They are the foundation of YDM’s high level of quality. YDM also covers all production processes in-house: machining on NC lathes, barrel grinding, pressing, blade edging, inspection and packing. Moreover, operators of each process check the workpieces with specialized measurement devices according to defined procedures. Only workpieces that meet the criteria can be passed on to the next process.
“Our most important policy is to perfect every machining process and to fix defective items before the process completion. We make sure that only quality products move on to the next step. We started this policy 10 years ago and the number of claims from customers decreased to one-eighth. When excluding user errors, our claim ratio of all shipped products is only 0.02%,” says Mr. Nobuhisa Sakurai, General Manager of the Development Department, explaining the company’s high-quality standard.
The most urgent challenge was the construction of an efficient production system to meet growing demands. It is not easy for YDM to instantly expand their production volume in case of an order increase, due to the full in-house production system. However, enhancing their production capacity is an unavoidable task under the current growing needs. To meet the end, the first process of plier production, box joint machining (surface matching), was a key.
“We had already done everything in human resource management, such as staggered work hours. Therefore, automated machines were necessary to further boost production efficiency. However, our top management demands high return on investment and prioritizes high profitability. After thorough investigations and calculations, we came to a conclusion that installing machinery capable of 24-hour automated operation would meet all of our requirements,” explains Mr. Sakurai, about their selection criteria of new machinery. (Continued in Vol.2)
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