Implementation date: December 2023, 12 (Friday) 1:13-30:16
Tour location: Toshiba Elevator Corporation Fuchu Factory
Participants: 7 people (PE 7 people)
We toured the facilities of Toshiba Elevator Corporation's Fuchu Factory located within Toshiba Corporation's Fuchu Office.Toshiba Elevator started its elevator business in 1966.The company has two domestic factories, a reliability evaluation facility, and sales and service bases across the country, as well as overseas factories and sales bases in China and Malaysia.What seemed to be unique compared to other manufacturing industries is that finished products cannot be inspected in the factory, but parts are shipped in the order they are assembled on-site, and installation and adjustment are done on-site.In other words, since supplies such as hoisting machines, control panels, rails, landing doors, cages, lighting, control panels and push buttons are shipped in the order in which they are installed on site, the order in which they are manufactured is not the order in which they are shipped. It was said that it would be.
The first place I visited was the Field Training Center, which is a base for technical education for experts, where education and teaching skills related to installation, maintenance, and servicing are passed on.I was impressed by the explanation that around 40 actual machines, including not only recent products but also older models still in use, are used as teaching materials for maintenance engineers.
The Service Information Center remotely monitors the company's elevators with maintenance contracts nationwide 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and prepares for and responds to unforeseen situations, including disasters.Using our own app and map system, we are able to issue efficient dispatch instructions in the unlikely event that a ``lock-in failure'' occurs, trapping a customer inside a car.How can we allocate a limited number of field engineers to deal with the huge number of elevators and escalators?While playing the role of a control tower, we will also remotely collect failure data from the field, analyze it, and feed it back into designs to prevent failures. They explained that they were also considering doing so, and it seemed that if such a cycle were realized, it would be possible to further improve product quality and reduce costs.
Lastly, we were given a tour of the panel processing, powder coating, etc. lines.In order to improve production capacity, the panel line separates what is produced manually by individuals and what is automated and mass-produced, and the painting line makes pass/fail judgments without the need for human labor. I was able to see a variety of innovations.
Even if an elevator is tested for shipment in the factory, the final finished product must be adjusted on-site to suit the building, and we realized that this requires experience and technical ability.In that sense, the tour was very meaningful as I was able to understand that nurturing and securing specialized engineers is the lifeblood of business, and that Toshiba Elevator Corporation is also making efforts in response to this.I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mr. Ikeda and everyone else who showed me around this time, as well as to PE Matsuoka, a JSPE member who arranged the facility tour and accompanied me on the day of the tour.
Participants group photo