Japan and Hannover: Smart Manufacturing Summit in Aichi, Japan IT Week in Tokyo

Spring 2024 took EMBIQ further east than ever before. In March we joined a European business mission to Japan and exhibited at the first Smart Manufacturing Summit in Aichi prefecture. At the end of April one of our business development colleagues flew to Tokyo for Japan IT Week, while in the same week we walked the halls of Hannover Messe with a delegation from our home region, the Lubelskie Voivodeship.

None of these trips was about closing a deal on the spot. They were about understanding markets that work very differently from Central Europe, meeting potential partners and testing how our experience with connected devices, custom software and quality assurance sounds to industrial companies. Here is what we brought home.

March: a digital mission to Aichi

From 12 to 15 March we took part in the Digital Cluster/SME Mission to Japan organised by the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation. The mission brought European SMEs and clusters from six countries to the Chubu region around Nagoya, the industrial heart of Japan and home to much of its automotive and machinery production.

The centre of the programme was the Smart Manufacturing Summit by Global Industrie, held for the first time from 13 to 15 March at Aichi Sky Expo. The mission companies shared the EU-Japan Centre booth in Hall C, each with its own double-sided poster panel. The centre's team prepared the ground remarkably well: our poster was translated into Japanese, we had a profile on the fair's matchmaking platform, and bilingual staff and interpreters helped at the booth. Our hotel was right next to Chubu Centrair airport, a few minutes from the exhibition halls.

Getting there was a small adventure. On 12 March bad weather diverted our flight to Osaka, and we reached Nagoya by train only in the evening, too late for our pitch slot at Aichi Innovation Days. Fortunately the organisers had planned a second round: on 13 March, the first day of the fair, we presented EMBIQ in the pitch session at the EU-Japan Centre booth.

What we pitched: quality as a service

For a manufacturing audience we chose one topic: software quality for connected products. Our pitch started from the most common reasons why device software fails in the field: quality gets too little attention early on, test automation is postponed, hardware and software are tested separately, and release checks come too late.

Our answer is to treat quality as a service that runs through the whole cycle, from concept and feasibility study through proof of concept and development to deployment and maintenance. In practice that means test plans written before the first line of code, test labs with remote access to real devices, automated tests that exercise software together with hardware, nightly runs in continuous integration, and remote diagnostics once the product is in the field. It is the same approach behind our testing services and projects such as QA support for remote device integration across Europe. In a region built on manufacturing quality, it felt like a natural topic to bring.

April: Japan IT Week in Tokyo

From 22 to 27 April one of our business development colleagues returned to Japan with an economic mission of the Lubelskie Voivodeship to visit Japan IT Week in Tokyo (24–26 April). In three days he held 21 meetings. His main observations:

• Automation everywhere. A whole hall was dedicated to companies offering business process automation. In Japan it is a mainstream purchasing category, not a niche.
• Cloud and machine learning dominate. Almost every conversation about new products touched on cloud platforms and machine learning, including modular AI systems for sales, marketing and HR teams.
• A different meeting culture. Even a CTO would often hand the conversation over to the right specialist, such as an account manager or an IoT engineer. Offers are also very precise, where European vendors tend to present several alternative approaches.

The meetings covered partnerships in IoT and machine learning, mobile and custom software development, and independent quality assurance for companies without their own QA teams.

The same week: Hannover Messe with our home region

From 21 to 25 April we were in Germany with the Lubelskie Voivodeship's economic mission to Hannover Messe (22–26 April), the world's leading industrial fair and a natural counterpart to Aichi. The trends were hard to miss: automation and robotics with AI built into production processes, quality control based on machine vision and real-time data analysis, integrated platforms that manage a production line from planning to execution, and collaborative robots working safely next to people.

In seven meetings we talked about integrating robots and production lines into customers' software, about camera-based image analysis as an additional safety layer for industrial robot arms, and about real-time location and asset tracking, where we discussed working as an integration partner for Poland and Austria. Several of these conversations continue with follow-up meetings.

Our participation in Japan IT Week 2024 and in the economic mission to Hannover Messe 2024 was co-financed by the project “Marketing Gospodarczy Województwa Lubelskiego III” (Economic Marketing of the Lubelskie Voivodeship III), funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the European Funds for Lubelskie 2021–2027 programme.

What we take away

• Japan rewards patience and preparation. Relationships start with trust, clear materials, ideally in Japanese, and follow-up that respects local habits.
• Quality is a good conversation starter. Our pitch in Aichi was about quality, and in Tokyo companies without their own QA teams asked about independent testing.
• Industry is converging. Whether in Aichi, Tokyo or Hannover, the same themes came up: automation, machine learning, vision systems, location data and the software that ties them together. We wrote recently about one of these threads in our post on edge AI for object detection.

We would like to thank the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation and the Lubelskie Voivodeship for organising and supporting these missions. If you met us in Aichi, Tokyo or Hannover, or if you are looking for a software and quality partner for connected products, get in touch.