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As a famous manufacturer of UV ink and coating in Japan, T & K Toka has a market share of more than 60% in Japan and is one of the most advanced innovators of LED UV ink, varnish and coating in the world.
Author: e-works Wang Cong
When the global printing industry has undergone profound changes, the ink industry is also in the process of "evolution". As a famous manufacturer of UV ink and coating in Japan, T & K Toka has a market share of more than 60% in Japan and is one of the most advanced innovators of LED UV ink, varnish and coating in the world. On the morning of December 9, 2019, the 6th e-works Japanese intelligent factory delegation came to T & K Toka headquarters in Saitama County, Japan and visited the mimeograph processing plant.
Figure 1 T & K Toka headquarters
01. Invisible champion focusing on ink technology
T & K Toka operation section chief introduces that since its establishment in 1947, T & K Toka has been engaged in ink production for more than 70 years, and its business scope includes production and sales of various printing inks; manufacturing and sales of synthetic resin for printing / coating / adhesive; related printing machinery and materials; import and export trade, etc. He explained that T & K represents technology and kindness. In the production of T & K Toka, its UV ink and coating technology has been praised by the industry, meeting the requirements of the changing printing industry for ink quality, small batch and wider products.
Figure 2 site of the delegation
The person in charge of the first production department of T & K Toka introduced the main production process of T & K Toka ink to the delegation. By mixing and dissolving the resin, vegetable oil, solvent and auxiliary agent, and chemical reaction at high temperature, the first semi-finished ink will be formed after cooling, and the first qualified inspection will be carried out. After the second additive addition and high temperature reaction, two different second semi-finished products will be formed, one is paste and the other is solid powder. At this time, the second qualified product inspection will be carried out. Among them, paste only contains 25% pigment and other ingredients are liquid water, so it is necessary to increase the link of water removal, and then add supplement to mix and grind meat (similar to the process of rolling meat into meat filling), forming a basic ink product. According to different application scenarios and customer needs, T & K Toka will allocate the basic ink products in the last step to meet the differentiated needs of users.
At present, T & K Toka has about 100000 standard products and about 50000 special ordered products. About 60% of the products belong to "flat printing ink", and about half of them are UV ink which react with UV and solidify instantly. The production cycle of a product of T & K Toka is about 4 days, and the annual production is about 24000 tons.
02. Close visit to ink processing
In recent years, in addition to the addition of ink for metal printing and special functional ink, T & K Toka has further produced high-temperature resistant UV ink, dust-free ink and other high value-added products with little impact on the labor environment and equipment. In order to further deepen the understanding of the ink production process and process, the team members visited T & K Toka "matching factory" at a close distance.
Figure 3 configuration of Saitama factory
In the "matching factory" layer, different kinds of mixed semi-finished inks will be produced by mixing different cleaning inks and pigments. The whole process is automatic, for example, there is a sensor under the clean ink storage tank, which will automatically mix with different pigments through the pipeline after reaching a certain capacity. In the fifth layer of the factory, catalyst powder, such as iron and plastic, will be added to the mixed semi-finished ink of the first layer through the automation equipment, so as to improve the viscosity and color of the semi-finished ink and form the basic ink products; in the third layer of the factory, after adding catalyst Assistant to different semi-finished products, T & K Toka will realize the proportion according to the customer's demand, for example, adding different moisture content, generating different kinds of ink products, and automatically filling and packing them into the warehouse.
03. APS application sharing of production planning and scheduling
As a typical multi variety and small batch production mode, production scheduling is a complex problem for T & K Toka. The production director of T & K Toka introduces that T & K Toka introduced Asprova advanced production scheduling software about 17 years ago. At that time, it was mainly used for production planning management in the production process of printing ink blending, grinding, adjustment and filling. According to the introduction of the production director of T & K Toka, in recent years, T & K Toka has updated and applied Asprova software, which he said is mainly based on the following three reasons:
First of all, it is difficult to achieve complex production plan management only by ERP. He explained that compared with the current situation, the overall production of T & K Toka ERP and Asprova before import was less, mainly relying on the manual arrangement of the production plan of the weekly unit. With the continuous development and growth of T & K Toka, it takes a lot of time and slow progress to manually arrange the production plan, resulting in insufficient inventory of raw materials and ink tanks, unable to meet the production demand, and unable to accurately respond to the delivery period of customers.
In addition, T & K Toka introduced Fujitsu C / 1 ERP products in the informatization construction a few years ago, but it hopes to meet the construction requirements of the overall production management system in accordance with Asprova update, further improve the production capacity of small batch and multi variety, and manage the manufacturing process through time-series mode.
Finally, at present, T & K Toka is operating at the speed of high-speed production plan. When there are many kinds of products and frequent insertion of orders, the production plan needs to be re arranged repeatedly. Asprova has high-speed computing capacity to cope with the plan adjustment.
Today, Asprova has been stably applied in the main factory of Saitama in T & K Toka Japan and the Shiga factory which started production in 2017, and realized the unified management of Saitama factory on the overall production plan. The production director of T & K Toka introduces the main steps as follows:
1. Input manufacturing requirements from C / 1 ERP;
2. Confirm, accept and confirm production demand through C / 1 ERP;
3. Import the products received the production demand into Asprova through C / 1 ERP;
4. Asprova develops and determines the immediate production demand;
5. The finished product information determined by Asprova is imported back to C / 1 ERP, and the production schedule is determined and the "operation instruction" is made by Asprova upload related data and C / 1 reading the production reservation information of related production products.
In view of the problem of inserting orders and reporting errors concerned by the members of the investigation team, the staff of T & K Toka explained Asprova's response to the scheduled change of production, for example, if the software is not carried out according to the correct procedures, the error display will appear. T & K Toka staff introduced that T & K Toka will provide customers with customized services in different colors no matter where the printing machine is located, although customers may only need a very small amount of ink.
4 Summary
By entering the headquarters of T & K Toka, understanding its APS production scheduling process and visiting ink production links in close distance, the team members have a clearer understanding of ink production mode and APS system under the mode of multi variety and small batch production. It is worth mentioning that Dr. Huang Pei, CEO of e-works, as the Secretary General of the delegation, also introduced the development status of China's manufacturing industry to T & K Toka and shared the top ten hot spots of intelligent manufacturing technology development, which injected new vitality into the interaction and cooperation between the delegation members and t & K Toka.
Figure 4 inspection group photo