Five reasons why customers choose Hitachi

Hitachi boasts a history in Information Technology (IT) spanning more than five decades, and has cultivated its Operational Technology (OT) for more than a century with a product range that mainly involves social infrastructure. With extensive experience developed in these broad-ranging fields of business, and the expertise acquired through practical application as one of Japan’s greatest manufacturers, we leverage our strengths to create value through our ability owing Products, OT, and IT resources.

When digitizing a factory, we achieve overall optimization by collecting data generated from products in physical space, assembling it in cyber space, and giving the analysis feedback to OT, which drives products. For this, profound knowledge, experience and expertise,  or domain knowledge, are required in the fields of products, OT and IT. That’s exactly the source of Hitachi’s proposal capabilities.

As customer needs become more diverse and advanced, there are cases where various gaps exist between the field and management (vertical), between the supply chains (horizontal), and between different industries (places). Hitachi calls this “the boundaries.” In particular, the "places," where different fields connect with each other, are becoming more important for solving the complicated issues that exist currently. Hitachi provides a total seamless one-stop solution by connecting with digital technology to solve boundary issues which arise not only between businesses but between companies or industries, ranging from procurement and manufacturing to logistics and retail, by utilizing the broad experience and expertise. With smooth collaboration, which has overcome "boundary" issues, we will achieve overall optimization of value chain, starting from individual optimization.

Hitachi, at NEXPERIENCE, shapes and promotes digital innovation to be appropriate for customers through collaborative creation with customers. NEXPERIENCE applies design concepts and processes that designers have accumulated since 1950s to solve problems, systematizing human-based concepts and approaches by leveraging the methodologies of multiple institutes, and it continues to advance through its practices. Hitachi's specialists in various fields work together to develop the customer's vision and viable plans and implement them using digital technologies, aiming to create value for business. There have already been over 1,000 collaborative creation activities by NEXPERIENCE, including global activities (as of June 2022).

Hitachi possesses expertise from many industry types and operations (use case solutions), cultivated in many business fields for many years and advanced digital technologies including AI, robotics, and security. This enables solutions, services, and technologies that take advantage of customer data to speedily create value through collaborative creation with customers. That’s Hitachi’s Lumada.

Going forward, we will package and register Lumada solutions and the application development environment to facilitate the introduction, and provide the Lumada Solution Hub, which will be available on the cloud base. This will achieve the speedy verification of solutions, and smooth transitions in production environments through collaborative creation with customers and efficient deployment to multiple bases, including overseas.

In order to achieve social innovation with Lumada, Hitachi is building an open innovation ecosystem. To accelerate collaborative creation with customers and partners, we established the Collaboration Forest, a global collaborative creation place within the premises of the Central Research Laboratory in Tokyo. And we promote industry-academia collaboration at joint research bases such as Hitachi The University of Tokyo Laboratory, Hitachi Hokkaido University Laboratory, Hitachi Kyoto University Laboratory, and Hitachi Kobe Laboratory for the aim of creating human-centered value and disruptive technology through research in social problem solving. Hitachi will further strengthen digital human capital, including top innovators in AI (FY2024: targeting 98,000 people mainly in overseas countries). Also we will invest 1.1 trillion yen in research and development in FY2022-24 to create innovation with customers. We will respect customer’s intellectual property, and build a win-win framework for intellectual property with customers in order to promote partnerships that utilize intellectual property.

To execute digital transformation, it is important to share a vision, the starting point for the future, and identify potential issues, the starting point for the present.

Hitachi develops a system by incorporating the process of collaborative creation with customers into NEXPERIENCE, discovering future business opportunities, sharing management strategies and vision, and exploring fundamental issues in business and processes that customers may not notice. With NEXPERIENCE based on design thinking, we will promote diversity effectively by making the most use of the unique qualities of diverse human capital and differences in culture in overseas research institutes and universities, in addition to the research laboratory and skilled design thinkers and experts, thus engaging in collaborative creation based on innovation and creative ideas.