Improve Production Technologies and Efficiency

We have launched initiatives related to the “RIKEN Standard,” the foundation of our manufacturing. These initiatives seek to create a deeper understanding of the standard in our sites around the world, improve our manufacturing and quality, share manufacturing-related issues at a global level, and solve them Group-wide.
In Japan, we will actively promote the introduction of automated equipment and predictive management systems for dealing with equipment failures, along with deliberations regarding the rebuilding of our factory utilities equipment. We are focusing on the processes that are the key to our manufacturing and deeply exploring production technologies through collaborations with other companies and academia. We are also accelerating our efforts to define optimal production conditions using process informatics (PI). Through these initiatives, we aim to further improve our quality and reduce our manufacturing costs.

Indicators and Targets

Standardization of Equipment Management

One of the major contributors to the decline of production efficiency levels is having to shut down production lines due to equipment failures. We are standardizing equipment management to achieve our goal of having zero serious equipment failures.
With regard to the standardization of equipment management, based on our policy of total productive maintenance (TPM), we have organized our approaches to corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance and carried out a full revision of our equipment inspection items. We have set monitoring inspection as a daily inspection item, performance retention inspection as a weekly inspection item, and inspection of performance retention, trend management, and change management as a monthly inspection item. We have also defined appropriate status ranges for normal operation for each item of equipment. Sensors have been installed at points where daily inspections are performed to monitor the status of equipment. This will enable us to reduce the workload placed on operators by revising the frequency of inspections and improving efficiency. It will also help address the issue of production efficiency declines due to equipment operation being suspended to perform inspections. Going forward, we will collect and accumulate status data from equipment that is in operation, focusing on monthly inspection points, and identify appropriate control ranges while at the same time expanding operation ranges. In addition, we will gradually step up our automation and labor-saving efforts in each production process.