Maximizing the Potential of Each Individual through DX from NSK

NSK’s Digital Transformation (DX) journey kicked-off with a training course for over 5000 employees. Today we talk to four members of the Digital Transformation Division HQ about the “Mindset”, “Experience”, and “Engagement” initiatives for achieving corporate transformation through DX.

Applying a “Change Management” Approach for Steady and Stable DX

KuramotoIn the Digital Transformation Promotion Office we are working to achieve Digital Transformation from three perspectives: Mindset, Experience, and Engagement. Today, team members working on each area will introduce our initiatives.

Firstly, when talking about “Digital Transformation” (DX), we must be aware that this is a transformation or change. Change is hard, often more so than you might initially expect. In our private lives at home, we may try to develop a new habit, but despite the benefits these habits often only last a few days. It is difficult not only to change, but to sustain change for a long period of time, especially long-standing habits or aspects of your mindset.

Digital Transformation requires a fundamental change in the way we work and even the way we think, but we need to undertake this process so that it does not prematurely end before fully taking root. With this in mind, my area of focus is mindset transformation applying what is known as “Change Management”. Change Management is about systematically transitioning an organization to the way it wants to be (moving away from the status quo) in a way that minimizes disruption and resistance caused by change. It also focuses on helping those affected by the change to adapt as quickly as possible.

Basically, we are working to implement initiatives to achieve DX that can be sustained not only for a few years, but for many years into the future.

To achieve a lasting DX, it is essential to first deepen our understanding of creating effective business processes. To this end, we began our efforts with a Design Thinking Workshop for approximately 5,000 people, roughly half of our employees in Japan. In this workshop, participants learned how to propose and refine business ideas by applying Design Thinking with a practical approach. Employees refreshed their perspective on determining feasibility, but also learned to think from the perspective of what kind of value can be quickly provided to which target.

For many employees, revamping or creating new processes using digital technology is not something very close to home. Therefore, we hope to stimulate the mindset of our employees through these workshops. We would like to make these efforts permeate the entire company to achieve a lasting DX.

Building Confidence with Easy Wins Close to Home

MorikawaNext, I would like to talk about the Experience perspective. One point that is often overlooked in DX is that it is not necessarily only about creating huge databases or complex systems. There is a lot of data and daily operations that could benefit from automation and that we are not fully utilizing. There are lots of tasks close to home in each department where we can start small such as automating routine inspections with connected sensors or using AI to analyze and visualize survey results.

To enable such activities and build up successful experiences in each department, the Digital Transformation Promotion Office has begun preparing a cloud environment that allows anyone to “casually” create data-driven processes in a small scale, easy manner with hands-on training. We hope that exposure to new technologies will help streamline operations and provide an opportunity to gain new knowledge.

Since we have just started the initiative recently, many employees and departments haven’t been able to apply it in their work yet. Here I am focusing on building up “easy wins” one by one so that employees can directly experience the benefits of DX in terms of increased efficiency and reduced workload. By using digital technology to solve the small problems they face in their daily work, I hope to deepen employees’understanding and motivate them to increase their use of digital technology.

◆Building an Employee-Driven Community to Spread DX

OkadaMy area of focus is Engagement.
One of the important roles of the Digital Transformation Division HQ is “Bottom-up DX” activities. Bottom-up DX is about creating an internal culture where DX initiatives are driven by employees in each department, where employees themselves contribute to sharing knowledge and spreading DX.

Every day we receive inquiries from employees about issues they are facing in their work and how to utilize digital technology to reduce their workload, such as automating repetitive tasks. We address such consultations in the form of “Guided Support”. Guided Support is a way of proceeding in which we do not simply address specific issues in the workplace directly, but rather let the employees who have the issues take the initiative in solving them, and we provide knowledge and peripheral support as needed. Specifically, we provide support from problem identification to specific improvement efforts by proposing methods, introducing tools and similar cases, creating specific system samples, giving lectures, and other activities.

By taking this approach, we believe we can solve one of DX’s key problems: the need for trained and qualified personnel. Our goal is to increase the number of “digital citizens” and expand the circle of people in the company who actively learn, create, and share how to use digital technology by first teaching and mentoring some employees with Guided Support, and then allowing those employees to teach and mentor others in turn. Until now, the people who create and use digital systems within the company have been two separate groups, but moving forward, we aim to enable the users to also be system creators. We would like any employee who wants to create a digital system to be able to do so on their own.

◆Creating an Environment Rich in Knowledge and Data

YoshimatsuI will also talk about Engagement.
I am responsible for the dissemination of data-driven methods, which I consider a very important task. Previously, I worked researching rolling bearing diagnostic methods using machine learning. Looking back on that project, I realized that I could only succeed because of the knowledge and tools that just happened to be close at hand when working on a problem where machine learning could be relevant. The project required specialized knowledge of the problem, a data collection environment, knowledge of data analysis, and a programming/computing environment. Essentially, I want to comprehensively make such knowledge and tools available and easy to use for more people in the company and motivate more people to draw out more knowledge from our data.

One of NSK’s strengths is its expertise based on the physical phenomena inside its products. However, the necessary elements for advanced data analysis across all experiments are not yet fully in place. For this reason, we are working to popularize new data analysis methodologies by preparing the required knowledge and computing environment to increase opportunities to gain insight from data throughout the company. Drawing out the latent value in our data will enable us to contribute even more to our customers.

To promote new data analysis methodologies, as mentioned above, we are engaged in activities such as mindset building and Guided Support to increase employee-driven problem solving. Another example is creating one-click access to a programming and computing environment that enables analysis of in-house data. This computing environment serves to lower the hurdle for data analysis and is already being used in actual operations and in in-house training.

In NSK’s DX, it is important to leverage the company’s strengths into the value we provide to our customers. We believe that if we can make sharing our findings from analyzing problems and data a habit not only among engineers but throughout NSK, we can create more value in the long term.

◆DX and the Power of Each Employee will Build NSK’s Future

KuramotoNSK’s DX journey began in earnest last year. We have people in the company who do a variety of jobs, and we will provide support tailored to each of them through initiatives in Mindset, Experience, and Engagement. We want as many employees as possible to become “digital citizens” who can solve problems by themselves through the power of digital technology, and we aim to fully onboard the company to undertake this journey of change.

NSK was an early adopter of cutting-edge digital technologies in its operations in the 1990s, utilizing it in a variety of settings, including in plant machinery, sales activities, technical design, and research analysis. While we may not be at the forefront of digital technology today, I believe that we at NSK have the spirit to be proactive about change.

The DX we are working on is closely connected to our Corporate Transformation (CX = Corporate Transformation). I would like us to take advantage of new digital technologies to create a new NSK and further contribute to realizing our Corporate Philosophy and support society as a whole.