On the morning of May 2, Acting Director General Jang-Hwa Leu of the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) at Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) took representatives from the industry, government, academia, and research institutions to visit Everest Textile, a textile company dedicated to the development of various innovative functional fabrics and manufacturing products for the world’s top sports brands including Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Columbia.
To accelerate industrial transformation and upgrading, Taiwan must get rid of the outdated way of thinking: reducing cost with scale of economics to compete. Hence, the government is proactively promoting five innovative industries as the core to drive the next-generation industrial growth. The MOEA has also launched the “Smart Machinery Industry Program” to drive the smart machinery industry, in an attempt to assist domestic industries to implement smart technologies and thereby construct a new eco-system featuring the smart machinery industry complemented by Taiwan’s precision machinery and information communication technology (ICT).
To keep pace with Industry 4.0, at the end of 2014, Everest Textile launched the “Everest 4.0” program to initiate plant automation upgrade, aiming to transform the company into a smart, digitized enterprise by integrating the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud service, and big data technology. Last year, Everest Textile further initiated the “Smart Everest” program targeting smart production, smart logistics, smart operations, smart energy, environmental safety, and smart products, hoping to transform itself into a smart plant with high-value manufacturing. According to VP Kao, Everest Textile supplies high-tech functional and eco-friendly fabrics total solutions for world-leading sports and outdoor brands to contribute to society and change the world with innovativeness, smartness, sustainability, and lean principles.
Nearly 150 representatives of the industry, government, academia, and research institutions joined the visit to explore how Everest Textile promotes smart manufacturing and enhances energy efficiency. By promoting exchange with benchmarking examples, the government hopes to accelerate the assimilation scope of smart machinery in the textile industry, so as to speed up the transformation of innovation, R&D, energy conservation and emissions reduction, to upgrade and transform Taiwan’s textile industry.