Digital Tools Integration and Human Resources Development for Smart Factories

Promoting digital transformation (DX) and realizing smart factories have become critical for manufacturing companies to meet increasing demands such as short-term delivery, quality assurance, and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) as well as to improve productivity and quality of work (QoW). To this end, digital tools should be provided for practical application in the preparation of the environments in which the companies can learn and study how to use digital technologies and tools by trial and error, while developing human resources for utilizing them for their own problem solving. In this paper, we describe the activities we used to develop various digital tools in the fields of manufacturing, robotics, and service engineering. We integrated these into a cyber physical system (CPS) developed for our model factory and offered a course for the company workers to learn these digital technologies. We also planned to develop our activities in collaboration with companies, universities, and other research institutes.