Yanmar Holdings announced it will begin operating Yanmar Synergy Square, a support base for monitoring the operational status of customers’ agricultural and construction equipment, beginning Oct. 19, 2020.
Data will be collected and analyzed via communication from sensors installed on machines and equipment. It will suggest parts replacement and maintenance before they malfunction. It was built at a cost of 2.5 billion yen (23.8 million USD) and will be operated by Yanmar Global CS, a subsidiary of the company.
Yanmar set up a support base in Osaka in 2015, but the focus was on monitoring and the actual customer support was often handled by staff at dealerships around the country. The company has expanded its functions in response to a five-fold increase in the number of products equipped with communication terminals to 110,000 units in 2020, up from 2015.
Source: The Nikkei (The original article was partially revised by the author.)
PSR Analysis: IoT-based equipment monitoring is likely to become increasingly common in the agricultural machinery field as well. The ability to prevent breakdowns is especially important for agricultural equipment, since it is not always to run it every day, and breakdowns are unacceptable when they are needed.
As more models of communication terminals are installed, data will be accumulated that can be used for failure trends and predictions, and the reliability of the data will increase. Yanmar’s rival and industry leader Kubota has already started KSAS, an IoT support system for efficient agriculture, and KSIS, an equipment monitoring system for the water treatment sector.
Japan’s agriculture is almost certain to face an increasingly severe labor shortage in the future, so improving efficiency is an absolute necessity. In other words, there is a race between efficiency and labor shortages. PSR
