CIO Bulletin

Ken Lu leads Winmate in Telehealth with technology first

Over the past 25 years, Winmate Inc has specialized in the research, development, and production of rugged industrial computers. Since its establishment, Winmate has been committed to the research, development, manufacture, and sales of its medical-grade computers brand. As a Taiwan-based manufacturer, Winmate has branches and service locations in North America, Europe, and Asia to provide worldwide customers with product design and technical support services. Winmate products are widely used in areas covering the automotive, petrochemical, warehouse and logistics, IoT, marine, aerospace, public safety, military, and healthcare industries. Besides being certified by international quality systems including ISO 9001, ISO 13485, and ISO14001, Winmate products are tested to comply with healthcare safety and IT specifications, including IEC 60601-1-2, 47 CFR Part 18, UL/cUL ANS1/AAMI ES60601-1, IEC 55022, and others. As a world-leading supplier of medical-grade IT equipment, Winmate has also been awarded the Taiwan Product of Excellence Award.

In 2021, Winmate acquired an order for medical-grade rugged tablet PCs from leading medical device manufacturers in North America. These medical-grade rugged tablet PCs are used for intelligent healthcare automation, such as high-sensitivity emergency rooms or operating rooms. They also provide patients with telemonitoring and home healthcare and nursing services to meet telecare demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest UHD 4K medical-grade display is designed to use medical imaging management systems at out-patient clinics and nursing stations and routine healthcare systems in hospitals.

Winmate’s eco-friendly healthcare products provide convenient-to-use platforms and prolonged services for processing comprehensive health data of inter-hospital healthcare systems. Winmate also provides enterprises and system integrators with solutions covering integrated network technology, computing platforms, and custom (customized) healthcare and IT products. With well-planned production processes, well-established quality control, and real-time quality problem reporting systems, Winmate guarantees the overall design, manufacture, and post-delivery service of its products and ensures that the healthcare products it designs and manufactures meet the healthcare IT platform demands of customers. With accurate market positioning and customer-demand-oriented differentiated services, Winmate has successfully evolved from a simple manufacturer with R&D capacity into a supplier of healthcare tablet solutions with core competitiveness.

COVID-19 brings the era of healthcare tablet digitization

With the rise of IoT, cloud computing, big data, and AI one after another in recent years, digital technology has swept across the globe to drive the digital transformation of all industries, and healthcare is no exception. Given the innovative trending healthcare, under Chairperson Ken Lu’s leadership, Winmate is developing total digital solutions for healthcare in collaboration with leading US and European manufacturers. According to Lu, the healthcare industry must walk ahead of the times. In general, visiting a hospital is never a pleasant experience for most patients. By simplifying processes with medical-grade rugged tablet PCs, patients can save time from queuing for registration and enjoy a more satisfying overall experience. By communicating with medical-grade rugged tablet PCs, besides reducing tedious work and uncertainty from handling medical records through wireless data transfers, medical personnel can take action faster and gain more time to save lives. As Lu sent Winmate’s top sales representatives to North America to discuss product design and requirements when leading North American manufacturers requesting a collaborative design of medical-grade tablet PCs, the proposal based on the patient-centered design concept has won the trust of these leading North America manufacturers, allowing Winmate to make a big step forward in the healthcare industry.

Innovative healthcare is patient-centered. By integrating information and healthcare systems with advanced network systems, innovative healthcare provides modernized healthcare services. It optimizes disease prevention and diagnosis for medical personnel to make efficient and correct judgments, reduce human-induced negligence, and help the proper allocation of medical resources solve workforce shortage problems. Innovative healthcare covers electronic medical records (EMR), cloud digital diagnosis, telecare, mobile healthcare, wearables, and others. Strictly speaking, innovative healthcare focuses on “smart hospitals” characterized by high complexity and technical thresholds. Currently, innovative healthcare is patient-centered, emphasizing the prevention of malpractice, reducing medical costs, and enhancing care efficiency.

MIT brand for sustainable development

The rise of smartphones and tablet PCs in recent years has changed the lifestyle of modern people. In 2011, the USFDA also approved physicians to use handheld devices to diagnose active medical personnel to legally present patients’ medical reports and records and even give prescriptions with the ubiquitous access, real-time updates, and convenience browsing characteristics of mobile devices. Handheld devices also enable physicians to enhance mobility at work and achieve patient care more efficiently.

While most of Winmate’s healthcare products, such as medical-grade rugged tablet PCs or UHD 4K displays, are exclusive and require special certification, finding buyers is a big question. According to Lu, although customer cultivation is a challenging issue with a smile, “insistence on developing products required by the market” is the key. He made an example with an order for rugged tablet PCs from a leading US healthcare product manufacturer. Winmate emphasizes a strong R&D team that keeps exploring the fundamental fields and overcoming all technical problems to acquire many core patents; continual innovation and R&D to enhance the efficiency of intelligent production lines; and practices a customer-centered culture and adheres to the “reciprocity” business philosophy, to optimize the foundation for rugged industrial computers, integrate forward-looking technologies, and enrich project management experience to lead transformation in the digital economy and thereby become the most valuable and trustworthy partners of customers.

Lu also emphasized that strategically keeping up with macroeconomic changes through continual adjustment in operations based on its core value is Winmate’s key to success. Hence, Winmate can stand the test of time and macro-environment until the last.

Dare to challenge: Focus on three elements for making a profit

“In my opinion, there are three elements to run a profitable business: concentration, feasible business model, and competitive products.” First, small enterprises must understand their niche lies and focus on servicing target customers to make profits.

Then, it is the business model. Lu understands that brand value and word of mouth are significant to enterprises in a demassified market. “Therefore, we only reach tier-1 customers” and invest in our marketing budget for various market bellwethers to understand and further try Winmate’s products. This is the reason for Winmate to build and develop its brand proactively. Currently, Winmate distributes 75% of its products with its brand. “No brand, no soul.” And product competitiveness has always been the goal that Winmate endeavors to enhance.

However, how does Winmate achieve these three elements? According to Lu, a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, excellent organizational capacity, and effective cost-cutting are the key that enables Winmate to provide “high-mix, low-volume” service while maintaining profit at the same time.

Then, it is the IT department’s capacity. Lu explained, while the market and customers keep changing, Winmate must make continual innovations to develop products that meet the market trend and customer demand. “Therefore, we need a powerful IT capacity. We have a well-organized professional IT team dedicated to making continual innovation and optimizing the efficiency of our production system.”

Third, while Winmate dares to challenge tier-1 customers, the demand for higher customer standards is a natural consequence. Although this also suggests pressure on the company, Winmate must take such pressure to make tier-1 companies its long-term customers. Then, “tier-2 and tier-3 companies will know where to find you.”

According to Lu, winning the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award has helped raise brand awareness. It is interesting that “many judges were my teachers.” Lu added, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award made him realize that a company should connect with the locality, develop a cultural heritage, and fulfill its corporate social responsibility after growing strong.

Lu added that Winmate would strengthen talent development in Taiwan through industry-academia collaboration and establish a foundation for cultivating technology talents. This year, Winmate will expand the recruitment scale with 50% R&D vacancies to cope with the expanding market.

Winmate is planning for the next 25 years. “To achieve this goal, every Winmate employee must stand fast at their positions and maintain enthusiasm to design, produce, and provide the world’s first-class products and services to help customers create value. Only a disciplined culture, disciplined employees, disciplined thinking, and disciplined action can create a different and great company.”