OMRON's reason for existence is to "create social value through our business and continue to contribute to the development of society." This will remain the same no matter how society changes.
In our long-term vision from 2022 to 2030, we are working to solve social issues such with such targets as "achieving carbon neutrality," "realizing a digital society," and "extending healthy life expectancy" by leveraging OMRON's strengths in automation technology, customer assets, and business assets.
We hold the OMRON Global Awards (TOGA), a training forum for all group employees to create businesses solving social issues, throughout the year. TOGA has three themes:
A total of 44,950 employees worldwide participated in TOGA in fiscal 2023, and a total of 6,747 themes were collected for 1 to 3.
OMRON Social Solutions Co., Ltd. (OSS), which provides power conditioners and storage batteries for solar power generation, has used the J Credit Scheme* promoted by the Japanese government to create a new business that converts the self-consumption of electricity generated by solar power generation in homes, which had been overlooked until now, into environmental value (credits).
The business model concept for this new business required the provision of a service in addition to the conventional power conditioners and storage batteries for solar power generation. This service would automatically collect self-consumption data without any effort on the part of the user, convert it into environmental value, and return the converted environmental value to the user as economic value.
OSS formed a project team by gathering members with diverse knowledge, values, and skills from both inside and outside the company. Through this project, employes acquired project management skills to move things forward while co-creating with members with different knowledge and values, as well as people management skills to make the most of various skills that each person owns.
As a result, sales of new businesses using the J-Credit Scheme grew steadily, up 130% compared to the previous year.
In this way, OMRON simultaneously develops new skills for its employees and grows its business through TOGA training.
The environment surrounding the manufacturing industry is undergoing major changes, and social issues related to manufacturing (increasing productivity and profitability, responding to ESG, etc.) are becoming increasingly diverse and serious.
As companies face increasing demands to realize a sustainable society, it is important for OMRON's Industrial Automation Business (IAB), which accounts for approximately 50% of its sales, to expand values it provides to customers by going beyond simply improving production processes to solving their problems, and extending to their entire supply chains and engineering chains. We will therefore contribute to solving social issues by leveraging our accumulated experience to create new value and by accelerating the speed of proposals to customers.
The key to solving the issues is "human resources who understand customer needs and can contribute to solving customer issues." Refining the ability of employees involved in the solution business to analyze issues, make proposals, and improve their engineering skills will lead to gaining the trust of customers.
For this reason, the IAB has developed its own human resource development program for all its employees.
Through this program, employees are able to strengthen their "abilities to grasp potential customer needs and design and propose a roadmap for solving problems," "abilities to derive solutions by combining internal and external know-how and technology," and "engineering approaches to implement solutions on-site." In addition, we also provide training to utilize cutting-edge technologies such as IoT, AI, and robotics that are advancing in the factory automation field to solve customer issues.
The enhancement of employees' problem-solving skills through such trainings also contributed to solution business sales, resulted in the IAB sales of 393.6 billion yen in fiscal 2023.
