YANAI ELECTRIC & MACHINERY Co., Ltd.
Waterworks facilities are a critical part of our daily lives and social infrastructure. The aging of engineers who maintain and manage these facilities presents an urgent need to pass on their skills. YANAI ELECTRIC & MACHINERY Co., Ltd. has its headquarters in Oita City and is responsible for operating and maintaining social infrastructure and plants. Seeking to turn the knowhow of veteran engineers into data, it came across Hitachi Power Solutions “Knowledge Base Constructing Technology,” which greatly advanced its efforts. While fulfilling its mission of contributing to the community, the company now aims to further perfect its system construction business so it can maintain and manage municipal waterworks projects over a wide area.
YANAI ELECTRIC & MACHINERY is contracted by local governments to manage the operations and maintenance of water supply facilities. It manages about 300 facilities within the region so no water outages or leaks occur, but in many cases there is no manual, so that knowhow only exists in the heads of the engineers. Mr. Harada is in charge of sales related to maintenance management of waterworks at YANAI ELECTRIC & MACHINERY, and is president and CEO of Teal Facilities Co., Ltd. , a group company established for business development.
He explained, “As a city’ s veteran engineer was approaching the age of retirement, we were in the position of losing the ability to use his precious knowhow unless we got his skills passed down quickly. Knowhow unique to a region or facility is hard to get, even if you think to ask about it or have it written down in normal times. Instead, we had him teach us when a problem occurred, or notes were written in pencil on a control panel on-site. It was difficult to bring it together systematically, so we had a sense of urgency to get it done quickly.”
And the depopulating of the region, which is happening in cities, towns and villages throughout the country, added to the sense of crisis.
Mr. Harada continued, “Although replacing decrepit pieces of equipment with new ones makes it much easier to operate and manage them, local governments cannot invest in equipment in areas with declining populations and low profitability. In short, given the premise of maintaining and using equipment over a long period of time, the knowhow on managing equipment accumulates in proportion to its age. It was an urgent issue to convert this knowhow into data and pass it on.”
Faced with this problem of passing on technology, the water business promotion group of YANAI ELECTRIC & MACHINERY first met Hitachi Power Solutions at HANNOVER MESSE 2018.
Mr. Harada said that upon hearing about Knowledge Base Constructing Technology at the booth, “I was excited about the possibilities. The goals and means of achieving them were clear and easy to take on. The idea of a knowledge base could relate to our problems and I readily saw how we could implement it."
That is how the project to transform their maintenance operations began.
