IoT contributes to solving problems in the workplace and energizes Japanese manufacturing

Clearly, small and medium-sized businesses play an extremely important role in Japanese manufacturing. Examples abound of the patented technologies of small factories in Japanese towns supporting state-of-theart equipment across the world. However, in order to prevail in competitive global markets, these factories will have to pool their strengths and further increase their competitiveness. Unfortunately, Japanese manufacturers—regardless of the scale of their companies—are not adept at making inter-company connections. Each manufacturer possesses its own creative technologies and knowhow, using this advantage to create highly unique products; the companies’ pride in their achievements frequently works to obstruct collaboration.

How can companies transform while continuing to take advantage of their individual qualities and strengths? In order to resolve such questions, the Industrial Value Chain Initiative (IVI) seeks to develop a Japanese reference model for the manufacturing industry that makes use of ICT (business process scenarios and platforms, etc.).

IVI uses ICT to enable collaboration between companies that are participating on their own terms. It is a group that aims to develop new competitive strengths in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and counts approximately 200 companies among its members. These include manufacturers of all sizes, as well as IT venders and consulting companies.

IVI not only provides reference models. Perhaps its most distinctive feature is that it conducts demonstration experiments at actual manufacturing workplaces, and ABeam Consulting has contributed as a support member to the promotion of genuine research and debate.

The noodle-making industry has seen significant benefits from these demonstration experiments in its attempts to carry out business process improvements using IoT, and in its efforts to find solutions to a variety of problems.

Manufacturers of noodle-making equipment are using IoT both to provide equipment that consistently produces higher-quality noodles and to carry out business process improvements. They hope these improvements will help to increase the completeness of their noodle-making customers. If noodle manufacturers install equipment that facilitates the consistent production of highquality noodles, they will be able to reduce losses and improve the quality of their products.

Through these demonstration experiments, we were able to use data to prove the effectiveness of business process improvements. More than this, however, we were able to show manufacturing sites the thinking processes and approaches that were necessary to handle problem resolution.

In the European and U.S. manufacturing industries, even if workers are not highly skilled, they still complete jobs when management tells them to “follow the manual”. In Japan, conversely, an approach to improvement has taken root in which employees strive to make the workplace better together. For this reason, rather than standardizing operations according to a manual, it is better for individuals to acquire both the ability to think and the skills to resolve problems themselves. When they encounter a new problem, they can then explore the best method for solving it immediately.

If companies can combine IoT and other technologies with this capacity to independently think, act, and solve, and if workplaces are able to accelerate PDCA cycles from problem identification to resolution, then the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s proposed “Connected Industries” will come one-step closer to reality. We believe that Connected Industries is ideal approach to a new form of Japanese manufacturing.

The above demonstration experiments also gave rise to the notion of “best practices and manufacturing equipment for problem resolution”—in other words, the idea of a packaged solution that combines both “soft”and “hard” approaches. Manufacturers of noodle-making equipment are currently considering the possibility of providing this package to both domestic and overseas customers as a Japanese solution to manufacturing.

When talking about IoT, there is a tendency to focus solely on its ability to gather and analyze data in real time and to visualize results on dashboards. However, visualization by itself is not enough. The manufacturing industry must determine how it can identify value-generating information from these visualized results, and what sort of problems it will thereby resolve. At ABeam Consulting, we believe we can contribute significantly to successful use of PDCA cycles from problem identification to resolution.