Meiji Co., Ltd.
Management of production equipment plays a critical role in the manufacturing industry. Meiji Co., Ltd. has taken a number of initiatives to resolve the issues of improving its production efficiency while optimizing equipment repair costs. As they continued to look for the system best suited for their company, the parts management system of the “SiteRemix” maintenance support solution of Hitachi Power Solutions caught their attention. They have achieved a great deal of progress with this effort by implementing it at 25 of their factories (not including group companies).
As they look to the future, they are pursuing a more precise parts management system and are working to create a system that brings further improvements, with the aim of utilizing it as the main maintenance management system.
Meiji manufactures a wide variety of products, primarily in its 25 factories in Japan. Mr. Hanamura of the Engineering & Environment Team pointed out some issues with equipment management at the manufacturing sites.
“Management of parts used to be conducted individually to best suit each factory, but that produced problems, such as discrepancies in their levels of management, and excess parts were being held in stock, leading to the urgent need to reduce fixed costs via centralized management. We tried implementing multi-function, general-purpose packages of software, but that gave us other problems, such as the large amount of effort needed for implementation, and difficulty learning to use the functions. Amid these challenges, we had to build a platform quickly for our headquarters and all the factories, and promote systemization.”
However, the spread of COVID-19 infections at the time had a major impact on society, which interrupted the efforts toward systemization.
Subsequently, the project was resumed in 2021 as one of the company’s internal initiatives in response to increasing societal demand for ESG management.
Mr. Hanamura recalled that when they first began its operation, “There was some pushback from factories about the changes in how parts were managed. We got people onboard via online briefings and individual phone calls, so now the initiatives are moving forward at each factory. This has led to achieving things like appropriate stock levels and not purchasing unnecessary parts.”
Mr. Komatsu, the manager of the Engineering & Environment Team, noted, “This excellent result was only possible because Mr. Hanamura applied his factory experience and understanding of the problems on the factory floor to organizing the knowledge on the management side.
He is the key person on this project as he gathered viewpoints from the factory floor and made them mesh just right with Hitachi Power Solutions.”
Hitachi Power Solutions was the only choice when selecting a partner to build the system. “Considering Hitachi Power Solutions’ flexibility in customization and future-oriented DX, I couldn’t imagine using anyone else,” said Mr. Hanamura.
