Song Mark Enterprise Co., Ltd.

plastic injection molds and injected parts

Song Mark Enterprise Co., Ltd. has been diversifying its products and services to enhance the added-value of sales, in contrast to originally concentrating on plastic injection molds and injected parts since its establishment in 1979.

Over the past few years, the company has expanded its capacity to assemble precision parts into finished or semi-finished items as ordered by buyers, offer design services and fine-tune design flaws.

Company president Y.S. Wu stresses that putting together various parts into a finished product is more challenging than injecting separate parts. "A finished product usually contains more parts made in-house than outsourced ones, but the trick is to keep outsourced parts of equal quality as our own," he says.

To ensure consistently high quality, Song Mark works with only contract suppliers conforming to RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and ISO standards.

As a quality-control step, the company tags the 4,000 parts made in-house with an identification, which shows its specifications covering material content to packaging. Each part is usually made with several processing steps, with complicated ones needing as many as 27 steps.

"We manage such QC data with computers and confirm them against actual products daily before production," Wu notes. Every morning, our chief QC officer, Johnson Chang, checks the first pieces off the 15 injection machines against their specifications before production.

Chang, an officially-certified QC engineer, has workers at every processing station play the role of customer to upstream coworkers-customers would not accept substandard goods-"when defective items are found by checking against company standards, they kick the workpieces back," Chang notes.

Working to global standards, the company checks online production twice in accordance with ISO standards and once before delivery. So far, the company has been certified with ISO9001:2000 and ISO14001, as well as being RoHS compliant.

Song Mark's salespeople are required to monitor the production of customers' orders from the beginning to the end, so that quality measures up to customers' expectations. They also communicate with customers to fully understand their needs before turning orders into products.

Consummate manufacturing expertise makes the company one of the few Taiwanese factories geared to produce the widest range of plastic items, as well as being able to deal with complicate designs. Currently, about half of its product lines consist of medical equipment parts, with the balance being made up of information-technology and consumer electronics components; while everything made go through destructive, fireproof and pressure tests.

The company's list of clients include many big-name suppliers in Europe, North America, and Japan, such as Dana Douglas medical (Canada), GE (USA) , HAMA Group (UK & USA), Avilion Ltd. (London, UK) Photocure ASA medical (Norway) Secoh Sangyo Co. Ltd. (Japan), etc.

Song Mark has won orders from these companies for not only its reliable quality but also considerable design capability, as well as efficient customer service. The past years have seen the company help customers fix defects in designs from other manufacturers. For instance, the company once helped a buyer make the best of a design flaw-fitting five micro components in a 1.06-mm crack.

In addition, many customers are impressed by its very competitive contract pricing. "Our prices are very attractive in Europe and the United States, but we do not compete on prices," Wu asserts.

Since its establishment, the company has never stopped strengthening its design capability, having to date equipped its R&D unit with 10 computers and design tools, including Auto CAD R14, Export CAD CAM, Pro/Engineer, and solid Works. Backed by these advanced tools and well-trained specialists, the company can maintain superb precision.

The company also has a continuing program to upgrade and expand manufacturing capability. It now runs a sizable operation with a combination of 69 injection machines in its Taiwan and mainland China factories, featuring injection forces from 50 tons to 1,350 tons; and 15 ultrasonic welders rated from 1,800 watts to 3,200 watts for assembling and inspection purposes, as well as a series of inspection systems. In addition, its tooling units in Taiwan and the mainland run 12 milling machines, four of which are computerized; two CNC electricity discharge machines (EDMs); five EDMs; two high-speed lathes; two grinders; four adjustable-arm drilling machines; three knife-edge forming machines; and three machining centers.

Over the years the company has steadily expanded factory size, from 4,000 square feet originally to 30,000 square feet today. In 1996, it opened a factory employing 200 workers in mainland China to handle low-end, big-volume orders.

Backed by a highly-efficient production system, the company promises customers lead times of 30 to 90 days, depending on complexity of designs.

Wu has been living up to the motto framed and hung on his office's wall: "Brave to Dream, Brave to Take Responsibility, Brave to Fulfill," to which he adds, "you dream, move in a new direction, take a new road, and give it all you got without giving up."

A living success story of entrepreneurship, Wu, born to a farmer in the Taiwanese Hakka County of Miaoli, first dreamt of setting up his own business and started from scratch. "I had no financial support from my family, but was driven by a dream and plenty of will," he concludes.