Fujitsu and NTT Communications announced to jointly develop a new service to achieve their vision of a 'Digital Utility Cloud' for machine tool industry.
The 'Digital Utility Cloud' concept aims for the acceleration of digital innovation by streamlining internal operations and improving customer service, which are often duplicated throughout the machine tool industry. To achieve this goal, the three companies will work to develop cloud services that can be adopted by any company and ultimately seek to establish the solution as a new de facto standard in the industry.
In recent years, the market environment has been rapidly changing due to the diversification of customer needs, with many companies increasingly turning to technologies including IoT and AI to enhance competitiveness through digital innovation.
In the manufacturing industry, Japan faces considerable headwinds as the impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution continue to reverberate on a global scale. Each company in Japan's domestic machine tool industry has played their part in maintaining competitiveness and a stable business environment by leveraging their respective areas of expertise. Nevertheless, in the near future, the use of digital technology will become an increasingly vital element in accelerating efforts to boost companies' ability to compete on the global stage.
Namely, it is becoming important to digitize services such as maintenance diagnosis and services for streamlining internal operations. Rather than having machine tool manufacturers approach digitization on an individual basis, this process should take place on an industry-wide scale with these services being made available as utilities for common use, said the companies.
