Visiting Job Sites to Verify a Hypothesis
Group Leader,
Development Group 2, IMS Engineering Department,
IMS Business Division, Olympus Corporation
Saichi Sato
Engineers find pleasure in designing and completing products. However, it is not until the products are delivered to customers and are greatly appreciated by those customers that engineers feel the actual pleasure of producing products. I wanted to share this pleasure with other people in charge of development.
The IPLEX SAII system, which boasts better usability and an IT-friendly environment, enables the user to operate the system easily from remote locations.
The IPLEX MX system was designed to meet the customer's need to carry the system on their backs. The system enables the user to move his/her hands freely, thus improving work efficiency.
Industrial endoscopy systems are instruments used to check the internal
state of things or to view places that cannot be seen directly with the naked eye. Such places and things include water and sewerage pipes, aircraft
engines, power plants, ancient tombs, and buildings that have collapsed due to earthquakes and other disasters. A conventional industrial endoscopy system consists of a separate power supply, light-source unit, scope, and display, all of which must be connected to each other by cables before using them according to the customers' business needs.
The IPLEX system, which was released in autumn of 2002, is an all-in-one endoscopy system, and its system—a concept was quite different
from that of conventional systems.
"It is too much trouble for users to bring all the components to job sites and build a complete system by connecting them with cables.
Therefore, we tried to develop an all-in-one system. This idea, however, had still been a hypothesis on the development side and not been verified
in the field. Accordingly, we decided to visit our users along with the release of products." (Saichi Sato, Development Group 2,
IMS Engineering Department, IMS Business Division)
Immediately after the release of the IPLEX system, each member of the Engineering Department visited 20–30 job sites together with
sales and marketing personnel. We asked users how their endoscopy systems were actually being used, what their needs were, and how they
evaluated the IPLEX system. We tried to visit up to 1,000 users in Japan because it was a good target number. We also tried to visit 100 overseas users, making the total number of users visited 1,100. For example, we paid door-to-door visits to users in some districts.
We also paid walk-in visits whenever we had the time.
"The sales people wanted the engineers in the Engineering Department to listen to what customers had said because some of the
customers thought highly of the IPLEX system but did not always buy it. Our visits with people in the Engineering Department helped us
confirm actual customers' requirements" (Tsutomu Uemura, Marketing Group, IMS Marketing and Planning Department, IMS Business Division)
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