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Global Fastener Forum—President Okuyama of Sunco Industries (Japan): Technological Innovation in Fastening Systems and Current International Market Trends
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2024-07-26
Sunco Industries is an international professional fastener trading and logistics company, providing JIS metric fasteners to all over the world, with an annual turnover of US$2.57 million. President Yoshihide Okuyama is great at programming and uses it to introduce Japan's unique logistics technology to the distribution center in Higashi-Osaka City. He has invested in the development of an automatic distribution robot by Hakobot, and plans to conduct a demonstration experiment of automatic fastener distribution this summer. The president shared his delicate Japanese logistics management tips in the forum.
In addition to importing fasteners from overseas suppliers, Sunco has customers who are mostly fastener retailers, and features shipment available for orders starting from one single fastener. The president said that Sunco handles large fasteners weighing 15 kilograms, going all the way down to small fasteners weighing 0.01 grams. That is a large assortment of types. A total of more than 2 million fastener products are handled, and Sunco continues to add 5,000 products every month, with the goal of reaching 3 million pieces. One of the customers places as many as 150 orders a day. On average, 50 orders are received per day per customer.
Reasons for Placing Distribution Centers Closer to Suppliers
Higashi Osaka is a big manufacturing city, especially known as the "Fastener City of Japan". This city has about 400 fastener manufacturers, the largest number in Japan, as well as the most fastener employees and shipments. Therefore, Sunco places the distribution center in an area where fastener manufacturers are concentrated. There are about 80 suppliers within a radius of 3 kilometers. Extend the radius to 10 kilometers and there are as many as 100 suppliers around. There is a reason for Sunco's decision to place the distribution center closer to suppliers. Without suppliers near the distribution center, a large number of products will have to be transported by large trucks each weighing more than 10 tons. Product receivers will be swamped with hectic work, and the number of trucks waiting in line will also increase. On the contrary, most of the goods for Sunco's distribution center are transported by small trucks, and large trucks only come once a day, so Sunco can enjoy the benefits of staying close to suppliers. The long working hours of truck drivers have been at the center of focus and known as“Japan's logistics problem in 2024". The reason is the sheer amount of time that it takes to unload from large trucks. Some distribution centers could therefore be troubled with traffic jams due to the queues of trucks. This is a big problem. The president believes the main reason for this problem is putting distribution centers close to where consumers are, causing delivery delays.
"Cargo Matching" Technology
Sunco mostly handles smaller fasteners of many types and small quantities, so the products need to be packed into cartons, small boxes or in bulk. Sunco gathers order data, and uses computers to constantly calculate to find out whether the product quantity is enough to fill a carton. Shipments are made when the order volume is sufficient to accommodate the carton volume, which improves efficiency. As order volume becomes smaller and smaller, it gets increasingly difficult to fit into one carton, resulting in reduced work efficiency. To that, Sunco's distribution center has 6 floors and each floor is stocked with goods. If a customer orders multiple goods, the goods will be taken out from each floor and sent to the packaging area on the second floor through a vertical conveyor. This is Sunco's “cargo matching” technology.
"Customer-Specific Closing Time Processing" Technology
To assemble products coming from each floor, it is necessary to set up temporary storage shelves for each customer. As the number of customers increases, so does the need for temporary shelves, resulting in a lack of storage space. To solve the problem, the president used mathematics to analyze order dynamics and calculate the final order time for each customer, and applied this calculation to all 5,000 customers. This technology, called "Customer-Specific Closing Time Processing", has acquired a patent. Although the number of shipments has increased since the introduction of this technology, overtime hours for logistics work have been reduced by 34%, and work in the distribution center can be completed more than an hour earlier.
The achievement with these two technologies has given Sunco enough foundation to successfully transition from a domestic trader to an international trader known today.
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