Daicel's production innovation broke plant walls by mapping decisions before digitizing

Daicel, founded in 1919 as a merger of eight celluloid makers, grew into a group of 75 companies whose plants carried old Mitsui- and Mitsubishi-era walls; separate unions per plant lasted about 60 years. In the late 1990s, manufacturing section chief Yoshimi Ogawa, now president, built the 'Daicel-style production innovation' method to break those walls.

The 2000 Aboshi integrated center in Himeji is the landmark: plants on a site the size of twenty Tokyo Domes are controlled centrally and run by about 20 operators, with a virtual factory linking Otake and Himeji data for energy optimization. Upstream-downstream friction that once forced buffer inventory was dissolved by reorganizing operations along the supply chain instead of by material form.

The method's core is a stage-zero preliminary survey. A workshop maps people, processes and functions, asking who discovers a problem, who decides, and who gets contacted — drawing the real decision flows. Waste becomes visible, and the company decides what people keep and what machines take over, then standardizes and systemizes.

Since 2000 the method has spread through Daicel's plants and to other companies, with Ogawa acting as consultant; the interviewers note the approach connects to large-scale profit and is now evolving toward AI-era autonomous production systems.