Toy manufacturing is labor‑intensive and increasingly plagued by workforce shortages, complex material management and imprecise preparation. Fierce market competition means that growth by simply hiring more staff or expanding facilities is no longer sustainable. To thrive long‑term, companies must embrace digital and intelligent upgrades.

Part 1 -- Industry Challenges

• Long Lead Times: Order‑to‑shipment cycles range from 40 to over 90 days, missing the key sales window and driving up carrying and storage costs.
• Inefficient Material Handling: Workers consolidate dozens of material types manually, leading to chaotic staging, low throughput and frequent errors.
• Labor Shortages: Skilled operators for production and material movement are scarce, jeopardizing continuous operation and inflating labor costs.

EFORK One‑Stop Logistics Solution by integrating cutting‑edge automation with advanced logistics equipment, delivers flexible, fully automated workflows—from raw materials through to finished goods. Our turnkey package, featuring an automated warehouse, AGVs and a unified dispatch system, seamlessly links with MES/ERP platforms to build a highly efficient, end‑to‑end intelligent ecosystem.

Part 2 -- Project Case

Case Study 1: Partnering with a Leading Chinese Sci-Tech Toy Manufacturer

Our client is a leading national brand in educational robots and sci-tech toys for ages 0–18. Their core vision is to build a “super factory” of Chinese brick toys surpassing LEGO. Located in Hefei, their new-generation intelligent manufacturing base is a purpose-built “super factory” spanning three floors, with warehousing deeply integrated alongside production lines. Due to the vast variety of materials and semi-finished products distributed across multiple floors, traditional manual operations faced heavy workloads, low efficiency, and management difficulties.

Based on our professional solution design, implementation experience, and overall strength, the client engaged EFORK to upgrade their Hefei facility under four core principles: transparency, automation, lean operation, and intelligence.

To meet diverse scenarios, EFORK deployed a clustered-robot approach to create an end-to-end, cross-floor, cross-zone integrated solution—driving “intelligent” toy production from warehouse to production line.

Solution Highlight 1: Cross-Elevator, Cross-Zone Integration AGVs communicate automatically with six on-site elevators, enabling semi-finished goods storage and finished-goods retrieval between the first and third floors, as well as semi-finished packaging returns from the second to the third floor.

Solution Highlight 2: Multi-Model High-Efficiency Collaboration Tugger AGVs and stacker AGVs work together to automate finished goods inbound and outbound processes. Under the EFMS dispatch system, multiple vehicles coordinate efficiently: tugger AGVs move finished products from the offline station to the third-floor staging area via elevator, while stacker AGVs transport goods from staging to storage racks in the finished-goods warehouse.

Solution Highlight 3: Hybrid Scheduling, Unified Traffic Control, High-Efficiency Operations The site uses a variety of mobile robots—CTU container robots, shuttle robots, and EFORK’s own AGVs—all orchestrated under a unified dispatch system. Equipment operates collaboratively without interference, effectively preventing congestion and collisions. This centralized control optimizes device utilization and significantly boosts production efficiency.

EFORK’s dispatch system now supports equipment from all major AGV/AMR vendors, covering shuttle, forklift-style, CTU container, and hybrid robot models.

Case Study 2: Partnering with a Global Precision Plastic Gear Manufacturer

In the precision gear sector, one company began with toy gearbox parts and, driven by millimeter-level accuracy, expanded into smart home and medical fields, becoming a world leader in precision plastic gears.
Faced with growing SKUs causing challenges in kit management, precise material preparation, and picking errors, the client aimed to increase storage capacity and operational efficiency while integrating information management. They adopted EFORK’s box-handling robot and 3D-vision palletizing solution to connect warehouse and production line information flows.

Upon project completion, the system handled over 18,000 items, with a design peak throughput of 60 boxes/hour—fully meeting production needs. Storage density and operational efficiency increased dramatically, enabling intelligent scheduling and lean management.

Solution Highlight 1: Rapid Project Delivery From contract signing to implementation and delivery, the project timeline was exceptionally short thanks to EFORK’s comprehensive logistics planning, product R&D, and rapid deployment.

Solution Highlight 2: Box‑to‑Tote and Tote‑to‑Box Conversion As a key logistics container in the toy industry, transfer boxes are widely used for in-plant transport, transit, and storage. Frequent material movements generate high pallet disassembly demands, which our AI + 3D-vision solution addresses—supporting stable de‑palletizing up to 2 m high.

Solution Highlight 3: Goods‑to‑Person Mode Switching from “person‑to‑goods” to “goods‑to‑person,” workers request materials with one click in the WMS. The system automatically allocates inventory and dispatches AGVs to deliver materials accurately to stations—minimizing back-and-forth travel and reducing picking errors.

Increasingly, toy enterprises are breaking free from traditional manufacturing constraints, striving for precision and high‑end capabilities. EFORK, committed to intelligent manufacturing, focuses on industry pain points and client needs. We have already partnered with numerous renowned brands on digital transformation initiatives. In the future, we will continue on the path of high‑quality innovation, enhancing our intelligent manufacturing capabilities to respond swiftly to client demands—injecting powerful momentum into the toy industry’s transformation and driving efficient, sustainable growth.