1. Hitachi’s Lumada: Accelerating Innovation
The 2021 Mid-term Management Plan announced in May 2019 sets objectives of improving people’s quality of life and add values for customers in the five key business sectors of IT, Energy, Industry, Mobility, and Smart Life. As the engine for achieving this at a global level, Lumada continues to evolve and grow on a daily basis.
(1) Evolution and growth of Lumada
Lumada is made up of three elements with the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of society and advances in technology, expanding its portfolio of expertise the more it is used.
- Co-creation methodologies and services
Hitachi’s own NEXPERIENCE suite of methodologies for use in the increasingly complex business environment can uncover the issues that really matter to customers in a timely manner and seek out business opportunities in collaboration with partners. - Domain expertise
Hitachi is building up a portfolio of Lumada solution use cases that utilize customers’ data to deliver solutions to the challenges they face, also making these available for wider use. - Platform products and technologies [Internet of Things (IoT) platform]
Lumada serves as a platform for consolidating the latest information technologies such as analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), security features that provide peace of mind, and operational technology (OT) for the control and operation of equipment and other systems.
These elements are proving their worth by facilitating use of the data that underpins the accelerating pace of innovation.
(2) Facilitating the use of data
The name “Lumada” is a combination of “illuminate” and “data.” The quantity of data is growing at an accelerating rate as digital technologies become more pervasive in factories, offices, and people’s lives and greater use is made of networked IT and OT equipment. By providing the means to work with customers and shine a light on this data from many different angles, Lumada can be used to improve current practices and pre-emptively address concerns.
Nevertheless, it is recognized that barriers to making good use of this data take a number of different forms, including the psychological, organizational, and technological.
In terms of these barriers, the NEXPERIENCE methodologies referred to in (a) above include ways of minimizing the psychological barriers by providing an exploratory approach based on design thinking in which participants can gain experience in observation, empathy, and the definition and resolution of problems. What is important in this activity is not just the methodology, but also that the participants are able to understand the customer and work with them. Hitachi is taking active steps to equip staff at its research facilities and elsewhere with skills in digital competence.
The domain expertise referred to in (b) is catalogued on a website* that presents this portfolio in terms of past projects with customers. This lowers organizational barriers by sharing the acquired benefits among related organizations and by providing insights that were not available through conventional business activities.
The third element, the IoT platform, lowers the technological barriers. The platform provides a wide range of resources, examples of which include the acquisition, storage, and management of equipment data; the Lumada Solution Hub for developing Lumada solutions utilizing existing use cases and deploying them globally; database and storage systems for the collection and management of data; operation and monitoring of IT and OT infrastructure; and security products and services. Hitachi has consolidated these three elements in the form of products and services for use in Lumada solutions, and intends to accelerate innovation by supplying these solutions that make use of customer data.
This section describe the features and example applications of these products and services used in Lumada solutions.
[1.3] Example products and services used in Lumada solutions