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Shimane Shimadzu Corporation, located in Hikawa-cho, Izumo-shi, Shimane Prefecture, is a manufacturing subsidiary of Shimadzu Corporation. The company conducts the integrated production of medical X-ray diagnostic systems.  New construction of its new building will be set to begin to digitize the coating process and enhance the welding robots. This construction will bring the plant more productive workflow and standardize the quality of its products. The plant produces thousands of units for domestic and overseas shipments throughout a year. The changes will also improve the working environment for the employees and promisingly reduce environmental impacts.

Made great use of RFID*, networking construction will also be conducted via the IoT in the new building. The fully automated coating will be put into practice on the single production line for a variety of parts for the various products including the general radiography systems, fluoroscopy systems, and mobile X-ray systems. Different operating instructions for each part will be conveyed to each coating process automatically, and the transfer of the parts between processes will also be completely automated. This will expectedly increase the current throughput for these processes by 1.5 times. The coating inspections will also be shifted to AI with the introduction of data from the visional sensor. Thanks to these state-of-the-art facilities, 70 % of the coating processes will be fully automated, which leads to the improvement of the working environment. The workload will also be substantially reduced. Furthermore, Introduction of a system to reuse over-sprayed painting materials will reduce the waste ratio by 25 % and will also contribute to reduce environmental impacts. Additional robots will be introduced for the welding process in order to raise the present throughput by 1.3 times and improve the productivity of sheet metal welding. To avoid future labor shortages, resolve issues in inheritance of craftsmanship and expedite quality standardization, the plant will promptly work on automation of work skills by robots.

Shimane Shimadzu was established in 1997 as a subsidiary for manufacturing X-ray diagnostic systems, which is developed by the Medical Systems Division at Shimadzu Corporation. It takes an important role for integrated production including machining, sheet metal, welding, coating, and assembly. For the supplies of the high-quality products to medical institutions across the world, Shimadzu Corporation and Shimane Shimadzu will improve their productivity by expediting digital transformation of the whole plant while maintaining the workplace environment to benefit employee their health and safety and reducing environmental impacts.

• *Technology for automatically identifying information on IC tags through contactless reading using radio waves

Shimane Shimadzu Corporation

Overview of the New Building and the Operation of the New Facilities

Overview of Shimane Shimadzu Corporation