Stats with Latz | Inside SRAM’s Taiwan manufacturing hub

Taiwan is an island that lies just 180 kilometres off the coast of mainland China. The entire island is barely more than half the size of our smallest state, Tasmania.

Two-thirds of Taiwan is covered by extremely rugged mountains, almost 4,000 metres high. That’s great for providing some epic mountain biking trails, but it means that nearly all of Taiwan’s 23.4 million residents are crammed onto a narrow strip of flat land down its west coast, with a total area comparable to greater Sydney or Melbourne.

That leads to a density of living and working conditions entirely foreign to most Westerners. High-rise apartments are everywhere, and even factories are typically in multi-storey buildings.

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SRAM Factory tour
SRAM’s OEM factory in Taiwan has progressively spiderwebbed out and expanded over the years and there are currently three concurrent sites. Based on the weathered sign, you can see how long it’s been here for.
SRAM Factory tour
Taiwan is a crowded place. It’s common to see rice growing right up to the edge of factory walls or even high rise buildings.

Into the SRAM zone

As SRAM’s current ageing main factory has grown, they’ve added slivers of land and buildings to the point where they’re now renting space from 23 different landlords on their current site!

I’ve visited this factory four times over the past 25 years. It was amazing to see how much things had changed in the eight years since my most recent previous visit.

Our bewildering factory tour took us up and down stairs and through corridors linking one building to another. It could be best described as a “rabbit warren.”

For my previous three tours, I’ve visited as part of a media tour organised by SRAM’s former Vice President of Marketing, Dave Zimberoff. Then we were given more time to ask questions and take photos.

SRAM Factory tour
Meet João Pires, Director of Manufacturing Asia and tour guide for the day. He oversees thousands of workers across three factories.

This time I tagged along with three visitors from one of SRAM’s larger bicycle brand OEM (Original Equipment for Manufacture) customers. Our host was João Pires, Director of Manufacturing Asia. Originally from Portugal, João oversees this and SRAM’s two other factories in Taiwan.

Soon, all three sites will be merged into a single building, currently under construction, of over 100,000 square meters, located not far from the factory I toured, which is in the Taichung district of Taiwan – the epicentre of Taiwan’s bicycle industry.

That’s a huge vote of confidence by the American-owned SRAM that Taiwan won’t be bombed or invaded by China anytime soon. I’ve found that the Taiwanese are fairly reluctant to discuss this topic. They’ll tell me that they’ve been living with threats for decades and just want to get on with life.

SRAM Factory tour
Here is a mock-up of the SRAM mega factory that they are working on now.

OEM Made To Order | Everything in the name of efficiency

After a mix-up with the times, resulting in a two-hour wait to get started, when I went to take a photo of the first production area we visited, I was horrified when João said, “No photos!” Fortunately, I managed to persuade him to relent, with a compromise of just still photos and no videos. Understandably, there’s a significant amount of IP (intellectual property) that SRAM doesn’t want to share.

Our tour lasted just over an hour, but compared to the half day or more of previous tours, that made it extremely rushed, with no allowance to set up photos.

Any production that involves hydraulics or electronics happens inside clean rooms with workers wearing hospital-style clothing and headwear. We were not inside these areas, but I could take photos through the windows.

SRAM Factory tour
This area is where RockShox rear suspension shocks are assembled. It’s “operating theatre clean,” pressurised and carefully controlled for dust, temperature and humidity.
SRAM Factory tour
In this clean room,  SRAM’s wireless electronic components are assembled, including Eagle AXS.
SRAM Factory tour
During Covid, when bicycle demand boomed, SRAM quickly scaled up from 3,500 to 5,000 employees. They say that one of their secret weapons was this training room, in which workers can be taught and practice just about every production process.

Every resource within SRAM’s factory is modelled with maximum efficiency, including space, energy, time and materials. Every component is made to order. In other words, they’re not rumbling away, making a thousand forks a day and putting them in a warehouse. They might be making 587 Lyriks for Trek and 313 Pikes for Specialized – not a single fork more.

There are separate areas for brakes, derailleurs, rear shocks, forks, dropper posts and so on. Within each of these areas, SRAM designs its production lines to be able to make all of its many different models – it’s all about flexibility in responding to customer demand.

SRAM is located in the heart of an intricate web of sub-component suppliers and bike manufacturing customers. It’s a complex ecosystem with delivery trucks coming and going all day.

João said that one of their key philosophies is, “Bad news needs to travel fast!”

SRAM Factory tour
SRAM trains is workers to know the smell, feel and viscosity of all the different fluids used throughout the factory. This creates a backup system to prevent costly mistakes like suspension oil from being fed into brake lines.

Automation with a human touch

First thing every morning, the workers for each production line meet with their Line Leader to discuss both their planned output for the day, and any current or potential problems. They’re encouraged to speak up because SRAM knows they’re best informed, being closest to the actual work and machines. An hour later, those Line Leaders meet with their Section Leaders. Then the Section Leaders meet with senior management, so that within half a day, every day, any serious problems can be communicated all the way to the top.

SRAM says their quality relies on optimising the Four M’s – Materials, Machines, Methods and Men. While the slogan is regrettably gendered, the alliteration does not reflect the workforce because it looks like at least as many women, if not more, work at this factory as men.

As you will see from the photos in this article, there’s a lot of hand work and very little automation at this factory, that’s a deliberate policy to enable more flexible production. Every process at every workstation is analysed. Typically, production teams are small, with only 15-25 workers. SRAM knows precisely how many workers are required on each production line for a given level of output and what to do if they have one, two or more less on any given day.

SRAM Factory tour
This worker is attaching the jockey wheels to the rear derailleur cage. A lot of assembly like this involves minimal tooling and still relies on nimble fingers.
SRAM Factory tour
A closer look at all the bits that will go into the rear derailleur cage that this worker is assembling.
SRAM Factory tour
For production flexibility, SRAM does their painting in-house. These fork lowers (right) are about to be painted in the booths at the rear of this area.
SRAM Factory tour
SRAM has replaced conveyor belts with minimalist gravity and human-powered devices like this fork slider.

Even things like how parts are moved from one area of the factory to another. Take the fork slider, pictured above. A worker inside the clean room places a finished RockShox fork onto the right-hand rail of this slide. Meanwhile, a counterweight, connected via a cable, slides up the left-hand rail. When the worker on the outside of the clean room takes the fork off the slide for final checking and packaging, the counterweight is heavier than the empty fork cradle, so it slides back up to the top, ready to take the next fork. In 2019, this production line used to make a fork every 46 seconds. Now it’s every 26 seconds, and their target is every 20 seconds. There are four fork production lines like this in the factory – SRAM makes a lot of forks!

SRAM’s factory was a hive of activity. I’ve visited a lot of bike and component factories over the decades across Asia, Europe and America. I still remember my very first visit to a Taiwanese factory – to SunRace in about 1996. I couldn’t believe how fast everyone was working!

I actually snuck away from the media group I was with to go back to the previous room and see if they were just “putting it on” to impress the visitors – they weren’t! I soon discovered that relentless speed, all day every day, is typical, and SRAM is no exception.

SRAM Factory tour
There are hundreds of workstations like this one throughout the factory where workers are using very small scale, low tech tools and plenty of hand skills to assemble components such as these SRAM Eagle 70 rear derailleurs.
SRAM Factory tour
The speed and efficiency that all these workers in the SRAM factory achieve is impressive, and they are continually on the lookout for ways to further improve and streamline their processes.

Maximising production

One critical metric that SRAM is always striving to improve is the time taken to go from raw materials (including sub-components supplied from outside) through to finished components.
That’s because the moment you start manufacturing anything, you’re investing space, energy and capital into that partially finished component, that you won’t turn into cash until it’s finished and shipped.

In some cases, this production time has been reduced from two weeks to just four hours.

It has been tough times in the global bicycle industry since the Covid bike boom busted in 2022. Although the factory still looked busy on the day I visited, João said they had the capacity to increase output by 50%.

SRAM Factory tour
Back to the future… when I last visited about eight years ago, there were flatscreens everywhere. Today, these have been replaced by whiteboards and paper, which Joao said enables better team engagement.
SRAM Factory tour
This is one of the more mechanised automated aspects of production – cassette assembly.

Over the years, they’ve consolidated from five Taiwanese factories plus a warehouse to three factories and a smaller warehouse. SRAM used to also manufacture in mainland China, but closed that factory in 2017.

“We’re committed to Taiwan,” João said. “The supply chain is very close.”

But he also revealed that SRAM are expanding its production capabilities in Portugal, where it has had a presence for decades after acquiring a chain manufacturer. This is in part because Portugal is within the European Union, therefore avoiding tariffs for that key market during uncertain times.

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SRAM Factory tour
This machine is laser etching words and logos onto dropper seatposts.
SRAM Factory tour
This is the brake assembly room. Most assembly lines are arranged in a U shape, with workers handing each component from their workstation to the next. The workflow is always set up in an anti-clockwise direction because SRAM says the human body functions best in this direction. This is actually something that’s had extensive research – Google it!

If my factory tour to SRAM was anything to go by, there’s still plenty of life left in the bicycle industry. I’m really looking forward to visiting their brand new consolidated factory, which, according to João, will be opening soon.

Thank you to SRAM for allowing Phil on this tour. The visit and this article are not sponsored, and Phil paid his own way to the SRAM factory.

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