When Chinese office furniture seating specialist UE is finished with its massive new plant in Anji, China, it will cover 7.2 million square feet, and its 3,000 employees will have the ability to crank out a mind-boggling 15 million chairs each year.
As an OEM, it certainly helps when your largest customer is IKEA. UE makes all of IKEA's home office seating products, but it also serves a large list of other customers around the world. On a recent visit, boxes in UE's warehouse ready to be shipped to North America were labeled for HON, LaZBoy and Serta. One of UE's biggest customers is OFS, accounting for about 4,000 chairs a month. Other boxes are marked for WalMart's Mainstays brand, Staples, Japanese furniture retailer Nitori and a destination in Russia.
To the U.S. office furniture market, UE doesn't mean a thing. As a brand, it simply doesn't exist. Yet for a brand you don't know, it has massive influence in the U.S. and around the world, providing high quality, low-priced seating options for companies here. UE is happy to be the anonymous manufacturer behind some of the best-selling chairs in the industry and pleased its customers get the spotlight.
The state-of-the-art factory will make serving customers around the world even easier. It is in the company's hometown of Anji, about 220 kilometers west of Shanghai. It is China's seating capital with several of the country's largest chair manufacturers in the city of about 500,000. It also is far from the choking pollution in other manufacturing centers in China and sits surrounded by mountains covered in tea and bamboo.
Many factories in China are unfairly portrayed as being behind the times, dirty and inefficient — throwing plentiful labor at issues instead of working on solving the production issues. This couldn't be farther from the truth at UE. During a visit to the plant a man wore an orange vest that said “lean manufacturing consultant” on it. Production numbers are written on whiteboards at the end of the lines, giving workers a glimpse of their output — just like plants in North America and Europe.
UE's workforce is dressed in smart blue shirts with red stitching and operate some of the world's most advanced manufacturing equipment. High-tech cutting machines lay out the fabric for the seating in a way that most efficiently uses the material. A Yaskawa drilling machine punches holes to make sure quality comes first on every product. The plant has its own test lab and its quality control department pulls out chair samples to make sure they are well-built and consistent.
It is an employee-centered company with events held throughout the year to celebrate employees, who make about 5,000 to 6,000 RMB each month (about $700 to $850 a month) and live in apartments on the factory campus. They also make money based on production goals, which is evident in how hard they seem to be working. More than 90 percent of the workers live and work on the campus, which is not surprising since most factory workers in China are recruited from the countryside to the comparatively high wages in the plant.
The safety and security of these employees is important to UE. Workers in loud areas of the plant wear ear protection and in dusty areas, masks. Yellow safety paint outlines areas where lift trucks travel. Slogans like “Dare to Innovate,” “Care About Quality” and “Empowering Clients” hang around the plant, reminding workers to be their best.