Message from the President September.2017

The FY2017 White Paper on Manufacturing Industries (Monodzukuri), a white paper jointly prepared by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, was issued on June 6. The paper discusses the direction of changes occurring in the Japanese manufacturing sector. The following three points caught my attention.

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・We are in an era in which companies cannot survive only by making good things. They are expected to become more than just manufacturers.
・Given technological innovation, how customer value should be created is changing from offering the ownership of things to the use of functions.
・The service solution, a solution that further enhances value through the integration of things with other things, among other means, is becoming an important factor for differentiation.
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Japanese manufacturers, many of which are Meitec’s customers, are redirecting their efforts from a focus on conventional “product-out” type manufacturing to value-added “market-in” type manufacturing, to respond to the needs of users and markets.

In addition, as the second point indicates, how customer value should be created is changing, or must change, from offering the ownership of things to the use of functions, namely, experience. Without taking this point into consideration, companies cannot survive the competition because their products or services will be not accepted by users. Meanwhile, advances in communication and sensor technologies have seen the emergence of the Internet of Things, which is making it easier to collect and analyze information that was once hard to access. I think that how effectively this analyzed data can be utilized will become major differentiating factors as we provide new services down the road.

How should we cope with the direction of changes taking place in manufacturers, our customers?

We must consider humbly what advantages and benefits our customers will obtain from our services. If we just continue responding to their requests, we cannot provide them with value that exceeds their expectations. We must make customers trust us and make them feel secure with us by producing outputs that exceed their expectations, thereby creating a situation in which our services are always associated with customers’ benefits.

I discussed the concept of antennas and sensitivity in my August message. I expect that Meitech engineers will deal with a large volume of information that should be taken into consideration, using their antennas and sensitivity, while building on their rich careers they have developed to date, and deploying their technological capabilities and resourcefulness. I believe that these efforts will enable us to positively provide services that are beneficial to customers. I consider marketing capability to be the ability to create an entire process that includes the provision of value to customers that they appreciate as beneficial and the receiving of appropriate monetary consideration for such efforts.

I expect that Meitec engineers will enhance their marketing capability to work on initiatives undertaken by manufacturing companies in many industries as they gear up for the fourth industrial revolution. Through these efforts, the Meitec Group will continue to effectively provide solutions for difficult challenges.