Orange-colored Ibis

This is a printer that will be installed at a customer’s plant this month.

We had the customer over for pre-shipment inspection today.

It’s named Ibis.

We’ve sold more than 60 of these machines and this is the first time we have gotten an order for the orange version.

These days, customers tend to bring the most bothering orders they have to inspection.

Therefore, they don’t look like usual corrugated boxes that you would normally imagine with normal aspect ratio.

For today’s inspection, we had a long narrow one, flat one and big and tall one.

For instance, the flattest case at the front.

Its original figure looks like this.

Extremely long, isn’t it?

It’s much harder than you may think to produce these cases with quality.

That’s why customers want to test the machine quality with those tough orders.

Now you must be wondering how it went today.

I’ll let you take a closer look.

As you can see, it’s perfect.

That long narrow ones,

They ended up looking like this

Seeing the machine eject those quality cases, the customer kept saying,

“It’s truly amazing!”

“How is this possible?”

“I couldn’t ask for more.”

The joint gap of our printers has been improved dramatically over the past few years.

Thanks to that, we don’t have to make customers worried anymore and can even surprise them in a good way.

We will make sure that this will be the “i-Machine” for the customer.

Strategy Verbalizing Meeting

ISOWA’s strategy verbalizing meeting.

It’s gotten into the 3^rd round.

The theme is how to realize our goal “ISOWA always keeps you going – always on the go!”

When we kicked it off, I asked them to promise me some things.

1.    Don’t try to find the right answer. There is no answer to this matter.

2.    Present your own opinion. Not from each department’s perspective.

3.    Listen closely to what other people say.

At first we tried to start by segmenting the customers but at some point we realized we didn’t even have to try.

Because we noticed that strategy is the only thing that segments the customers.

Customer segmentation isn’t even necessary when you have clear strategies.

Then the next question was,

Which segment do we need to target?

For this question, we all agreed on targeting Segment #2.

That’s when the discussion got excited.

Then we picked one company from the segment and discussed how to embody “ISOWA always keeps you going” for that particular customer.

We found another clue during this argument.

It’s the word “Tailor-made”

When we say, “ISOWA always keeps you going”, who are YOU?

It’s not just machines or plants or management.

It’s each customer who we’re trying to keep going.

That’s why we should stop looking at things from our own side and contemplate what the president of the customer really wants from ISOWA.

Putting ourselves in the customer’s shoe, we came up with some ideas.

We brought them to the president to get his opinion the other day.

After getting his agreement and taking a look inside the plant, today we had a discussion on it.

As a result, we agreed to get the spin-off project started which will be focused on this customer with Mr. S and Mr. M appointed as leader.

We’ve also decided to put an end to the 3^rd round as the spin-off project is beginning, which none of us saw coming.

Strategy verbalizing meeting will go on to the 4the round, of course.

We will be helping the new project get on the right track and keep up efforts to realize our vision.

What I’m trying to say is,

ISOWA will keep ourselves going, too!

Thank you all who has been a part of it!

Message From Thailand

A tree standing under the beautiful sky.

This is a photo Mr. H, my business companion, emailed me from Thailand.

>I visited company T yesterday.

>Right in front of the parking lot, I found a tree with your name.

>If I remember correct, it was when you attended the opening ceremony for T’s new plant.

>It feels like it’s growing faster than usual in the tropical weather.

>I have attached a photo of the tree.

>Hope you will like it.

It’s that tree!

It was February, 2011.

I made a speech in English in front of a large audience.

It made me nervous and sweat a lot.

That’s why I remember clearly.

It’s only been 4 years but, like Mr. H says, it’s gotten really tall.

I’m also glad that Mr. H cared about me enough to send me the photo.

Speaking of the ceremony, a woman sitting next to me talked to me after my speech.

“It was such a fun speech”

She looked so familiar to me. She reminded me of someone I know from TV.

My instinct was right.

It turned out that she was Mari Christine who used to appear on a Japanese TV show.

Ever since that day, we have been in touch for 4 years now.

Gorgeous ceremony, the speech I made and getting to know Mari.

All those memories came back to me at once.

Thanks for the picture, Mr. H!