To enhance competitive advantages amid rapidly changing external and business environments, it is essential for a company to have an agile decision-making capability. To achieve that, the whole organization must work together to build a data-driven operating base where data will be readily available for use in a timely manner.
We aim at automating all necessary data collection, processing and editing tasks instead of depending on manual work to complete these tasks, so that all teams, from the production floor to the executive level, can access and gain visibility into a consistent body of data whenever necessary and at the required granularity to enable the most effective analysis. To achieve this, the first necessary step is to standardize our business processes that generate data, optimizing it in a comprehensive manner.
We are starting this commitment at domestic sites with a view to eventually scaling it up to the global scope, to create a resilient, sustainable and future-proof data-driven operating base.

We promote data-driven research and development on a corporate-wide scale to accelerate the resolution of social issues through a greater harmony of human and data and to build up our new material discovery power. We have launched a “research and development data management core system” where our laboratories can accumulate their everyday data and manage it appropriately. In addition, a “web application for material development assistance” has been newly launched to utilize these accumulated data in a most efficient way.
As technological transformation of informatics technologies progresses, we are working on creating a digital system that “autonomously searches for optimal conditions” to further develop our informatics to obtain the best possible outcome.
In addition, we also work on introducing “process-targeting informatics technology” and “simulation-assisted material development technology.” Having these technologies widely adopted across the Group will help further build up our R®D capability.

In manufacturing, we aim at building more sophisticated production systems that do not rely on human intervention and are now taking steps to actually introduce such systems to five domestic and five overseas locations. Currently we are working to fully automate the condition setup tasks in these production systems and also to introduce more advanced auto pilot functionality and robotics features.
On production lines, we are trying to fully digitize and automate the condition setup tasks for each product number and also collect production status information (temperature, pressure, flow, vibration, etc.) using various sensors. By continuously collecting and storing this information and introducing automated monitoring and autopilot functionality, we aim at establishing full visibility into the entire production process. In addition, we plan to actively utilize robotics technologies to automate non-value-generating tasks such as horizontal traverse movements. In recent years, the manufacturing sector faces serious issues, such as decreased worker availability as a result of a chronically low birth rate and loss of skills due to retirement of experienced workers, which need to be urgently addressed. In addition, we must be ready to respond to unexpected emergencies such as natural disasters which are occurring more frequently due to climate change. To address these needs, we are working to build a centralized production information management system that covers not only our domestic locations but also overseas sites as well. We believe that having such a globally stabilized manufacturing system will be beneficial to the world society in the end.
We plan to roll out these sophisticated systems gradually to overseas sites that we have acquired through M®As. We will make sure that these roll out projects will be planned and implemented in appropriate manner with due consideration for differences in local cultures and values.

As generative AI and other advanced digital technologies illustrate changes in society at a greater pace than our expectation, it is essential for a company to quickly identify and adopt all the necessary digital technologies in order to maintain and improve its competitiveness.
To avoid being left behind and steadily enhance the Group’s strength, we must help all employees improve their digital skills and to nurture a corporate culture of digital agility to be ready to adopt new data and digital technologies in a timely manner. Our Group’s digitalization efforts go beyond merely improving and streamlining our operation within the existing IT framework. We promote utilization of data and digital technologies in such a way that, with the use of user-friendly tools such as RPA, AI-OCR, no-code tools and BI, all employees can take part in business operation transformation without relying on IT experts. We will continue to drive digital transformation in our workplace so that all our employees will be more digitally adept and literate, which in turn will allow them to select more diverse ways to work.