Sumitomo Wiring Systems’ developmental engineering is structured to meet all of the various needs of our customers, both in Japan and overseas. Product engineering and manufacturing engineering are the core of our structure.
First, product engineering means joint developmental engineering with customers by locating technical bases close to customers to immediately respond to their requests. In Japan, we have technical centers in Toyota, Atsugi, Utsunomiya, Hiroshima, and other areas, adjacent to almost all major Japanese automakers. In North America, our technical centers are located in Detroit. We have established technical centers in England, Germany, France, and Italy, close to some of the leading automakers of Europe. In addition to our technical centers, we send engineers to customers’ sites to conduct developmental engineering with them. These guest engineers or partner engineers account for as much as 50 to 70 percent of the employees at all technical centers.
Second, manufacturing engineering is a way to help produce products more easily. Until about 15 years ago, domestic production was a very high percentage of our total production and we had manufacturing engineering departments at manufacturing bases all over the country. But, then we rapidly shifted production overseas. We now have manufacturing engineering bases in the Americas, Asia, China, and Europe that are striving for perfect designs by identifying and meeting needs in various regions.

We focus on training to enable joint product development with our customers. For example, we have the G-STEP verification and qualification system that is based on training programs and tests and covers different areas, including circuit design, in-vehicle design, manufacturing design, CAD operations, and three-dimensional parts design. G-STEP has four levels and 80% or more of our people strive to attain the highest rank, Level One or Two. Those who fail to rank high are coached by their department managers to improve the skills of all members. We’re developing human resources who can immediately help our customers at their companies by enhancing their abilities in this steady way.

As another method of improving our capabilities, we’re continually advancing benchmarking activities. This is an effort to identify our real ability by comparing our strengths and weaknesses against objective criteria. We also have a Benchmarking Room that displays various wiring harnesses used by automakers at home and abroad, to learn from the entire industry for future progress. It’s important to do our best to win over our competitors. But, we’re also applying the principle of competition in-house to recognize our status quo for further improvements and strengthen our technical capabilities and motivations.

Moreover, we believe the benchmarking activities must not be passive, and we’ve started new actions. We’ve asked each design department a question: “What do current technology trends require you to do?” Now, they’re trying to find the answer. We’ll present the facts and findings obtained in this process to the world, instead of keeping them in Japan only. The active benchmarking activities are just beginning.

To support our customers in the ever changing and evolving 21st century, we’ve adopted the theme: Lead time reductions in all processes, ranging from development to manufacturing. So, we’re doing virtual prototyping to allow various computer simulations that enable independent final checks of manufacturing. We’ve also built a knowledge database. It’s like a shelf of technologies to reduce losses by screening the data in advance; qualified people can retrieve information from it at any time. By accumulating knowledge and allowing knowledge to be shared globally, the database enables people, at any distance, to check technologies on the same level. Even though people come and go on a worldwide basis, we always maintain our knowledge and technologies at a high level, and we’ll continue to build mechanisms to enable developmental engineering that satisfies our customers.

Each of our customers has its own company culture and methodology. Their systems also differ. This means we deal with data conversions and individual cases while producing products. But, we want to reduce lead times and quickly respond to our customers in spite of their different systems. This desire has led to our globally common design. It converts customers’ different design systems into Sumitomo Wiring Systems’ own system to realize the manufacturing engineering. We’ve achieved higher efficiency by making manufacturing engineering identical all over the world.
We once received different types of design coming from single manufacturing sites. In response to this, we’ve standardized data input methods, processes, and checking mechanisms. Through a lot of trial and error, we’ve developed a global framework where the same design data is sent from any design base to any plant and products are produced using the same method. This enables us to respond to our customers’ strong request that all plants overseas must provide products with the same quality.
We’ve made our manufacturing engineering common across the globe, but customize the product engineering to our customers’ needs.

The most important thing we’re searching for is to proactively propose products that meet our customers’ needs—products that make them happy and enhance our “Product Appeal.” We have to identify our customers’ needs in a timely fashion to improve the product appeal. If we fail to uncover their needs, we won’t be able to survive as a company.

To strengthen product appeal, we’re practicing “Product Appeal No. 1 Activities.” We discuss what technology strategies or products we should deliver by watching trends and discussing themes with each other.

Of course, we have to have respect for each and every engineer, from the Development & Engineering Departments who actually works everyday at our customers’ sites. We’re cultivating a culture to enable workshops that create new products by improving communication in the departments and company and organizing the work environment.