Apart from developing SRL mechanisms, materials, and plastic mold flow, The R&D Center maintains collaboration with the Department of Industrial Design of Tunghai University to enhance aesthetic quality of products and so to participate in world-leading product design awards. In 2022, three of our products won the GOOD DESIGN Design Award of Japan, raising our international visibility of our products.

Core technology, organization, and resources are the three major themes of our R&D deployment. Through close collaboration with the academia and by promoting internal education and training, we achieved an all-win collaboration model favoring YOKE, academic research, and education-to-employment (E2E) so as to create maximum safety value.

We have been working closely with academic and research institutions to strengthen our core technologies through industry-academia collaboration and maintaining collaboration with National Taiwan University and National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, including four industry-academia collaboration projects in 2022. We also hired scholars and experts in related fields to conduct collaborative technology R&D emphasizing the market-oriented commodification of R&D outcomes, as well as upgrading the technical capacity of the whole industry chain. Chairperson, General Manager.

Through regularly holding technology discussion meetings with the professors and graduate students engaging in industry-academia collaboration, we brainstorm technology innovation for product applications upon the academic foundation. In 2022 we collaborated with the Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology in the design of the double-layer structure and local reinforcement structure of SRL shells. They were applied to improve six sets of plastic injection molds to reduce mold design changes by over 50%. We also assessed give new plastic materials, and one of them can reduce deformation by up to 42% to effectively enhance product assembly efficiency.

In conjunction with our future operational objectives to create an inter-system management platform for corporate innovation, the Company initiated the “YOKE 2020 PLM” project as a component of our improvement for the R&D process. It is a four-stage process with 3 specific goals: The 1st goal is to integrate all detailed information of design, optimize existing processes so that we can boost our overall R&D efficacy; the 2nd goal is to connect and retain all relevant product information between all departments during the process of product development in order to maximize the effectiveness and benefit of R&D resources. The 3rd and final goal of the project is to incorporate all information from all nodes of production by integrating all personnel, data and systems as we pave the way for Industry 4.0.

Phase III of the YOKE 2020 PLM project was completed in 2021. In 2022 we continued to optimize and adjust the development process of the PLM system towards phase IV and assessed and implemented engineering change (EC) management, outputting three key points for the design change process: