The R&D Center develops SRL organization, material development, and plastic molding, and increases cooperation with the Department of Industrial Design of Tunghai University to participate in four major international design competitions, including the IF Design Award of Germany, the Red Dot Design Award of Germany, the IDEA Design Award of the United States, and the GOOD DESIGN Design Award of Japan, in order to increase the visibility of products in the international exposure and improve the aesthetic quality of products. We have been laying out 3 major directions such as key core technology, organization, and resources. At the same time, through close collaboration with the academia in conjunction with our promotion of the Inhouse Experts Plan, we were able to achieve a win-win-win model of cooperation for YOKE, academic research institutions and students through resource sharing to create maximum value for safety.

YOKE has been working closely with academic and research institutions to strengthen our core technologies through industry-academia cooperation. In 2021, we collaborated with National Taiwan University, National Tunghai University, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, with a total of four ongoing industry-academia collaborations. We have also engaged expert consultants in related fields to conduct technical collaborative R&D for YOKE R&D Center, which is oriented to commercial production/market demand while dedicated to improving the technical capabilities of the entire industrial chain.

YOKE has been organizing technical knowledge workshop with instructors and students from participating universities on a monthly basis. Through brainstorming by all participants, we were able to develop an innovative and exclusive programmable design and assessment tool, which we kept working on and upgraded into analytic graphic interface V4.0 for our self-retracting lifeline structural design. The development in the program graphic interface enabled us to achieve a 100% application rate for self-retracting lifeline design, dramatically reducing our R&D lead time and development error rate.

In recent years, the main goal of development is to digitalize the products and open the door to digital technology, transforming outdated industry convention. Through the combination of hardware and software, we have developed metal-based RFID technology in hardware and installed it in hook products, and applied for patents in many countries. In 2021, 951 products were introduced into digital service, and the development is ongoing. In terms of software, we have developed the APP checklist process and connected the cloud management platform by scanning RFID to meet the daily checklist and asset management application needs of our customers, and the big data generated from the digital circulation of over 1 million RFIDs is a strong backing for product development and improvement.

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.

The "YOKE 2020 PLM" project completed its third phase by 2021, integrating the drawings, materials, BOM and process information generated by the PLM system into the SAP ERP system to improve process efficiency and reduce errors. In addition, we have shifted the file creation method of BOM and process information from SAP ERP to PLM system to manage the product life cycle through PLM system and achieve the goal of controlling product development and design on a single platform.

In addition, we continued to optimize the development process of PLM system and move toward the fourth stage to promote engineering change (EC) management, combining the objectives of the first three stages to achieve the material version of design changes, the control mechanism of drawings and the definition of the scope of design changes, etc., all integrated in the PLM platform for control, in order to avoid the inconsistent versions that are easily caused by the engineering change process in the past.