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Knowledge Integration
Vol. 54, No. 2, April 2018
Fujitsu has accumulated a wealth of knowledge through its provision of diverse ICT products and delivery of solutions and services for a wide range of industries. Against this background, Fujitsu has announced FUJITSU Knowledge Integration as a concept that combines various type of knowledge to create new business and services for its customers and Knowledge Integration in Action as new initiatives and services that embody this concept. This issue introduces new-business co-creation activities and work-style innovation as a result of Knowledge Integration in Action.
Japanese version: Magazine FUJITSU (Vol. 68, No. 6, November 2017)
Preface
- Special Issue on Knowledge Integration (224 KB)
Norihiko Taniguchi, Representative Director and Corporate Executive Officer, SEVP, Head of Business Lines, SEVP, Head of Global Services Integration Business, Fujitsu Ltd., pp.1-3
Digital Transformation via Co-creation
- AI-based Chatbot Service for Financial Industry (475 KB)
Takuma Okuda, Sanae Shoda, pp.4-8 - In light of recent trends toward enhancing customer contact points, companies must clarify the issues they face, how they intend to solve them, and their specific objectives while aiming for step-by-step improvements. To this end, many companies are starting to provide "chatbots" to automate communication with people using computers as a service for interacting with customers. This movement is also being felt in the financial industry that handles a variety of complex products and services, and there are already cases of using chatbots for customer support and sales. Fujitsu has developed FUJITSU Financial Services Solution Finplex Robot Agent Platform (hereafter, FRAP), an AI-based enterprise chatbot service. FRAP achieves automatic robot support of financial-product sales and customer support by having users converse in a chat format with a robot having knowledge accumulated by machine learning. This paper first introduces trends in enterprise chatbot services and examples of using them in business applications. It then presents a case study of introducing FRAP in Sony Bank Inc. and describes its features.
- Utilization of Open Data via Public-Private Cooperation in Tourism Sector (1,010 KB)
Tsuyoshi Maita, pp.9-15 - Fujitsu is using open data from the tourism sector to enable diverse stakeholders to create information linking models through public-private, regional, and international cooperation, which are generally referred to as tourism cloud models. The intention is to develop a new information-oriented society through data linking of tourism information owned by regional public entities as open data. This requires increasing the amount of information of existing information services, reducing data collection and maintenance costs, and accelerating the distribution of regional information by sharing data between various information services. To this end, Fujitsu is developing technology to automatically collect data from websites and to standardize data formats. This development is part of a linkage platform for smooth mutual utilization of tourism information in the public and private sectors. Such shared use will lead to the development of a co-created society through regional data linking. This paper describes the advanced technology that characterizes these models, operation models created through regional cooperation, and measures for utilizing regional open data from the tourism sector. The main points are based on actual examples of public-private sector cooperation implemented in Aomori Prefecture in Japan.
- Digital Learning Platform "Fisdom" (310 KB)
Yoshiaki Matsunaga, pp.16-21 - Recently, services that offer university-level lectures free of charge or for a small fee via the Internet have been attracting attention. In 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) started in the U.S., and over 500 schools mainly from the West are now offering courses, which over 30 million people are now taking. In Japan, with the aim of making MOOCs popular, courses certified with the Japan Massive Open Online Education Promotion Council (JMOOC) began in April 2014, and the courses are offered by 45 universities and taken by over 500,000 people. Fujitsu has established "Fisdom," a digital learning platform that provides MOOCs and small private online courses (SPOCs) to diversify and sophisticate education using flipped learning. Fisdom is equipped with functions including discussion boards, where students ask and answer each other's questions to solve problems, and peer evaluations of reports, in which reports submitted by students are evaluated by other students. These functions lead to retention of learning by providing students with opportunities for mutual teaching and learning and helping students give each other advice. In addition, students' lifelong learning can be recorded, which raises expectations for the utilization of their learned knowledge in numerous life events. This paper describes the features and application examples of Fisdom.
- Global Approach to Knowledge Sharing and Standardization for Promoting Growth in Service Business (225 KB)
Claus U. Tauscher, Kai Haasis, Jan Menne, pp.22-27 - With the corporate DNA of a customer-oriented attitude adopted by 160,000 employees worldwide, Fujitsu globally offers services and products as an ICT vendor. Meanwhile, one issue is that we have not been able to build an adequate system for sharing knowledge and experience between employees of different countries and regions. In addition, one new solution and service concept after another is being brought to the ICT market, and these concepts need to be promptly introduced and continuously added to the set of services offered to customers. A system for doing this is also globally required. This paper presents the Service Configurator Project, Fujitsu's activity for sharing knowledge distributed between global organizations and information about excellent solutions of various regions to promote standardization. It also outlines the tool suite and service configurator that are results of the Project.
- Aiming for Digital Business Innovation by Expanding Services for Co-creation (256 KB)
Shozo Sakai, Koichi Hidaka, pp.28-33 - While digital technology is exerting a considerable influence on society and the industrial structure, the environment surrounding customers is undergoing significant changes on a daily basis. In 2015, Fujitsu proposed FUJITSU Knowledge Integration, a new integration concept for creating new businesses and services for customers. In 2016, we announced a service framework for co-creation as FUJITSU Knowledge Integration in Action to embody this concept. At the same time, we opened FUJITSU Knowledge Integration Base PLY, a facility that serves as a place for co-creation where Fujitsu's systems engineers and customers can hold workshops. It was launched in Fujitsu Solution Square (Ota City, Tokyo, Japan) with the purpose of leading to open innovation. We have made the most of our experience based on many past cases of practical co-creation and achievements, and together with customers, are heading toward the goal of digital business innovation, which we call the "digital journey." We have also expanded our service framework for co-creation. This paper first describes all the co-creation activities of Fujitsu and the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop, a concept that forms the basis of such activities, and presents the services that have been expanded.
Digital Transformation Driven by Technology
- New Approach to Improving Site Operations of Distribution Centers with IoT Technology (263 KB)
Kazuki Fujita, pp.34-38 - Yamato Logistics Co., Ltd. operates many distribution centers as a logistics partner of various companies. Those companies include Fujitsu's customers, where improvement activities for various site operations have been carried out to flexibly accommodate increases in the volume of items handled and new logistics processing operations necessitated by the addition of new products and volume variations between busy and slack seasons. Anticipating future business expansion of partner companies, Yamato Logistics has been looking for a way to improve site operations and achieve greater efficiency and accuracy. To this end, Fujitsu worked with Yamato Logistics to devise a new approach to improving site operations that would solve the problems inherent to the existing approach. A major measure was the visualization of site operations through IoT technology to convert operations into quantitative data. Further, the conditions of a superior distribution center were visualized to establish the ideal form of distribution centers. This has made it possible to accurately grasp the problems at operating distribution centers and predict the degree of improvement possible. This paper describes the approach to improving site operations at distribution centers devised by Fujitsu.
- Creation of New Manufacturing Diagnostic Process by Co-creation with Customer (543 KB)
Tomohiro Aoyagi, Yojiro Numata, pp.39-46 - A key issue at manufacturing sites is how to ensure that manufactured products are consistent with the design. Manual labor still remains a part of industrial manufacturing processes in many industries. Human intervention unavoidably involves human error and it is important to find ways to promptly detect them so as to prevent rework. In the steel structure industry, for example, shortening of construction period, cost reduction, and securing of quality are urgently needed to survive the fierce competition for orders, and manufacturers are taking active approaches to eradicate rework due to human error. Fujitsu has analyzed the causes of rework in existing manufacturing processes and tested hypotheses from a technical perspective and from the viewpoint of users. The purpose is to build a system that allows anybody to easily diagnose manufacturing defects by applying ICT. This has led to the establishment of a "new manufacturing diagnostic process" making use of augmented reality (AR) technology. This new manufacturing diagnostic process has been verified jointly with a customer to achieve a tenfold improvement in productivity from the conventional process and eradicate rework arising from human error. The new manufacturing diagnostic process has also contributed to the development of FUJITSU Manufacturing Industry Solution 3D-CHOJYO. CHOJYO in Japanese means "superimpose." This paper describes the course of activities relating to the new manufacturing diagnostic process, including hypothesis testing, demonstration, and product creation.
- Promoting Global Software Factory Activities through "Yakushin," Integrated Project Infrastructure (416 KB)
Naokazu Hazeyama, Hideki Sato, Hiroshi Tahata, Masaki Yamashita, pp.47-53 - For businesses in government and public enterprise sectors, it is necessary to build high-quality systems quickly and at low cost that correspond to specific laws, institutions, and the operating characteristics and required specifications for each business. In addition, the approach to system development has changed from vendor-provided development solutions to ones that combine vendor-provided and open source software solutions. On the basis of these circumstances, when Fujitsu is developing and operating public-related systems, it promotes activities focused on determining development approaches and deciding project management approaches, with a priority on stable operation of customer systems. Starting in FY2017, we launched global software factory activities (software industrialization from a global perspective) and the internal application "Yakushin," an integrated project infrastructure to standardize work quality. Yakushin enables us to determine development approaches and tools, as well as project management approaches. In this paper, we describe Yakushin's core development infrastructure, Yakushin/Crust, as well as its project integration management infrastructure, Yakushin/Tophat.
Digital Transformation via AI
- Disaster Prevention System Utilizing Social Media Information (530 KB)
Naoshi Morita, Makoto Hayakawa, Norisuke Takao, pp.54-58 - Information on disasters has conventionally been obtained by using physical sensors such as water/rain gauges, weather radars, and meteorological satellites, with national and local governments playing the central role. However, putting physical sensors in place requires time and is costly, and installing a sufficient number of them is not always possible. Fujitsu has worked jointly with the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management (NILIM) at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Together, we have researched and developed a system that can collect and analyze in real time the disaster-related information posted on social media by residents (social sensor system), and implemented it in society. The system can pick up information that is useful for grasping disaster situations out of a large amount of information (big data) by utilizing AI technology for location estimation and filtering out unnecessary information. In addition, it can estimate when and where a disaster is occurring at the municipality level by statistically processing the posted information collected. By using this feature and combining the information posted by residents (social sensor information) and the information from physical sensors installed in the field, the system helps disaster prevention personnel to make prompt decisions and carry out disaster-related activities. This paper describes our solutions to issues for realizing the social sensor system and outlines the system.
- Contribution of Medical Big Data Analysis Technology to Medical Innovations (407 KB)
Tadaaki Katsuda, Hayato Isshiki, pp.59-65 - Recently, utilization of big data by ICT has been attracting a great deal of attention in various fields in Japan and overseas. In the medical field, for the purpose of realizing personalized medicine, innovations ranging from diffusion of electronic medical records to accumulation of medical care information and further to integration of genome information have been promoted up to now. However, there is a limit to manually processing the large volume of information accumulated by these, and technology utilizing medical big data that can be effectively and efficiently processed is considered necessary. Accordingly, Fujitsu has developed medical big data analysis technology. This technology meets the requirements specific to the medical field such as execution of analysis with promptness, high reliability, and accuracy ensured and an appropriate interface independent of the analysis skills of users. This technology has been confirmed to be capable of contributing to medical innovations through actual medical care information analysis conducted jointly with the National Hospital Organization’s Nagasaki Kawatana Medical Center. This paper presents the medical big data analysis technology developed by Fujitsu.
