WISE CENTER INDUSTRIAL GROUP INC.

Garden shears

Adhering to a tried-and-proven strategy has helped build Wise Center Industrial Group Inc. into one of the most reliable, successful garden tool makers globally: the firm has over the years focused on creating lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with clients, keeping its promises, and R&D.

Since its founding in 1991 in Taichung County, central Taiwan, Wise Center has specialized in filling OEM (original equipment manufacturer) orders for garden tools and related accessories. Running two factories in Taiwan and one packaging plant in China, the firm turns out three major lines, namely garden shears, hand tools sets and ladders.

The company's product portfolio is enormous, including for examples pruners, handle tools, gardening peripheral equipment and parts, shovels, gardening scissors, step stools, ladders, etc. Wise Center also offers a variety of non-gardening items, such as aluminum zinc castings, lighting fixture parts, household hardware, plastic products, building materials, etc.

Never neglecting the importance of advanced machine tools to quality of output, Wise Center employs topnotch production equipment as automatic presses, heat treatment machine, powder painting and non-stick coating machine, CNC (computer numerically controlled) processing machine and grinders, all of which are periodically recalibrated to uphold the degree of precision and proper performance.

Insisting on delivering the best quality products has helped Wise Center to build solid reputation among global brands of garden tools. And to ensure meeting the highest quality and safety standards, the company adopts, regardless of cost, a full line of sophisticated, precision inspection instruments, including hardness testers and the newest tensile strength tester.

Global Standards

Paying close attention to IQC (input quality control), IPQC (in process quality control) and QA (quality assurance), Wise Center is ISO 9001: 2000 approved, as well as product certified to the German GS (GeprUfte Sicherheit) standards. No wonder for the company claims a defect rate even lower than 1ppm.

Religious Belief in Trustworthiness

Thomas Lin, a sales manager before venturing into producing garden tools in 1983, is the man responsible for reviving Wise Center from its earlier flagging fortunes. Lin's years of sales experience has helped him to make shrewd decisions that have steadily pushed corporate performance ahead in recent years.

Lin religiously believes that "trustworthiness" is the backbone of Wise Center: "Only promise what can be done to avoid exaggeration from tarnishing the company name." The man says that the firm does not make reckless decisions to scramble for big orders to keep production lines filled without having such capacity." But he confesses that such strategy made the company lose clients to rivals initially; however, buyers eventually returned for Wise Center is simply more trustworthy and lives up to its promises.

Another specific strategy used to keep Wise Center's reputation of reliability is to guarantee rapid, smooth delivery. To achieve such objective, the company, besides periodically upgrading and adopting manufacturing equipment, stays focused on production flexibility. Lin says that, based on personal, real-world experience, running at full capacity is sometimes not helpful to convince clients of prompt delivery. "Although paradoxical, but this has been proven true many times in reality," he says. "With buyers just wanting to receive goods on-time, planning extremely tight production schedules does not help to put buyers' minds at ease."

Proving Lin's determination to keep production flexibility is the fact that the firm has rejected repeatedly requests for exclusive access to sizable proportions of Wise Center's capacity, specifically to turn out shovels and carts. Asked if such decisions undermine corporate profits, he replies "keeping more clients assured of access to our production outweighs profitability."

Being R&D-focused Helps

Besides prioritizing trustworthiness to profitability, Wise Center's consistent dedication to R&D related to materials and finished products also helps to enhance corporate success in this sector.

Employing an R&D team of 8 technicians including Lin, Wise Center runs production backed by seasoned staffers with considerable background in fabricating cutting tools, material science, and 3D CAD technology, all of which enable the company to effectively fill ODM (original design manufacturer) orders: less than 60 days is needed to turn clients' ideas or new product projects into usable prototypes.

Sharpening Material Science

Yet another strategy that helps to keep Wise Center a sought-after manufacturer in the sector is its painstaking efforts spent on improving materials. Aware of the ubiquitous, troublesome problem of corrosion-blades on many garden cutting tools tend to easily rust, become dull in a few years-the company decided to work with Taiwan's largest steel product supplier, China Steel Corp., and a highly respected R&D institute, Metal Industries Research & Development Centre, to develop the "Non-stick-Coated Blades."

Lin states that to achieve "non-stick coating" that shields bare metals from sap requires blades to be tempered at a comparatively hot 430 Celsius, a process that is a Catch-22 as tempering over 200 Celsius also diminishes the steel's durability and hardness.

Undaunted by the Catch-22, Wise Center, helped by CSC's 8 large continuous boilers, experimented with different chemicals to solve the problem and innovatively tempered blades twice to effectively minimize compromised hardness and durability, according to Lin. Plus the processing enabled the company, as a desirable byproduct perhaps, to reduce the blade thickness by 15-20%, hence achieving also improved lightness and material efficiency.

Despite having to endure the extremely tough, costly investment, almost exhausting our passion and resources, Lin says, the effort eventually enabled Wise Center to be the only supplier in Taiwan to offer garden cutting tools with non-stick blades, greatly upgrading corporate competitiveness globally.

Notable Innovations

One noteworthy new product in Wise Center's lineup is the light-duty garden cutting tool series, which all feature forged aluminum bodies with flexible handles and are available in three different models: bypass loppers, anvil loppers and wavy hedge shears, each of which is designed for specific applications.

All featuring non-stick blades, the light-duty shears are also very efficient and durable. These aluminum-bodied shears are also compact and eye-catching for their bright, anodized finish. Female gardeners find these lightweight shears especially attractive for obvious reasons.

Wise Center also shows its engineering ingenuity via the patented use of gear transmissions. To enhance labor-saving in gardening shears, the company innovatively installs gear transmission mechanisms in loppers and cutters to effectively minimize friction between moving shafts, which also reduces metallic wear to enhance durability.

The Gear Chain Hook Anvil Lopper is one item that adopts intelligently engineered mechanisms to achieve labor-saving-via gear-driving chains. Coupled with powder-coated handles and ergonomic design, the new lopper is a very popular seller.

"The quality of a gardening tool hinges on its functionality, not looks," Lin says. Embracing such motto has not helped Wise Center to keep developing, building gardening cutters featuring desired functionality and durability, but also garnered ample praise from clients, as well as defining the firm as a proven supplier of innovative garden tools.

Avoiding Underselling

Shrewdly avoiding the unproductive underselling in the global market, Wise Center remains focused on developing high-end, professional garden cutting tools. Its years of effort, dedication and progress have helped to sharpen corporate competitive edge-solidly setting up Wise Center as a successful OEM and ODM; while the company is venturing into new territory: trying to build itself into an OBM (original brand manufacturer).

Although offering higher margins than manufacturing, branding is often easier said than done for most Taiwan-based enterprises, for successfully building private brands takes considerable time and money. Undaunted by potential setbacks, Wise Center has developed its own Win-Win brand to market a line of high-end gardening tools globally.

Backed by cutting-edge R&D and production capability, Wise Center achieved considerable popularity with its Win-Win-branded garden tools in Asia, including India and, especially China, where sound partnerships have been built with local distributors. More positive news is that its own-branded tools, featuring proven quality and available at competitive unit prices, are consumer-recognized in Switzerland, and will be launched in other European countries.

Well on its way to successful own-branded marketing globally, Wise Center's ultimate goal is to build everlasting, mutually-beneficial partnerships via branding," Lin says.