ASCII Team Leaders More freedom to work and collaborate with IoT in the office

Uchida Yoko held an exhibition of new office products "UCHIDA FAIR 2020" at the head office showroom in Tokyo from November 13th to 15th. Prior to the exhibition, President Noboru Okubo held a press conference to explain his thoughts on new ways of working, and showed the design of the company's office products and the direction of IT solutions for offices.

Hiroyuki Uchida Noboru Okubo President and CEO

Freely choose a place to work and improve work efficiency

President Okubo explained the history of Uchida Yoko's consistent efforts to improve office productivity since the establishment of the "Intellectual Productivity Research Institute" in 1989. He started full-scale office consulting business in 2010 and was the first to advocate the concept of "active commons" in 2012. This is a concept similar to work style reform, which means that each individual can freely choose a place to work.

In fact, at this exhibition, a large number of office supplies that were devised so that people could work freely in the office were displayed.

For example, a cafe-style shared space in a trendy office. Sofas and low tables are installed there, but sometimes you want to concentrate on your work. To meet the needs of such solo work, we propose a personal booth surrounded by "Tsuitate", which is made of the same material as the interior. It has a seating sensor and a lamp that changes to red and green at the top of the booth so that you can tell at a glance whether it is in use even from a distance.

A centralized work space that surrounds the sofa with a tall partition. The availability is displayed by the color of the lamp.The right is in use, the left is empty

In addition, the exhibition of "Cage Space" for discussing complicated things with two people instead of one person was also attracting attention. At this booth, "sound adjustment technology" is applied to adjust the sound so that you can concentrate on talking with the other person even in a lively shared space, not just covering it with an enclosure, creating an environment suitable for secret talks. Can be made.

President Okubo himself enters the space for secret talks and demonstrates the effect

Eliminate wasted time preparing for meetings with IT

On the other hand, the company is focusing on improving office productivity through IT. In particular, at this exhibition, we focused on improving the connection with presentation equipment, supporting the collaboration of members during the conference, and supporting the operation of the conference room.

The company is working to enhance the functionality of its own wireless presentation device, "wivia5," based on the recognition that the most important thing in presenting at educational sites such as schools and conference rooms is "immediate projection." This is a controller that connects to a large stationary display, with an emphasis on easy connection. In addition, BARCO's ClickShare series lineup is being strengthened.

In addition, we have also developed "MeeTap," a cloud service that allows you to operate conference devices more intuitively using a tablet terminal. This is because the tablet permanently installed in the conference room constantly monitors the setting of the display in the room and the wireless and wired connection status, and presentations and video conferences can be done with the push of a few large buttons displayed on the tablet screen. It is a service that is ready for.

Masashi Hashimoto, Manager, Product 2 Section, ICT Product Planning Department, Sales Management Group, Sales Division, ICT Research & Development Division, explaining the system "MeeTap" that centrally manages AV equipment in conference rooms.

When using the equipment installed in the conference room, someone may disconnect the cable on the back of the monitor at the previous conference and you may not be able to connect, but if you have this service installed, the icon displayed on the tablet will be `` It will notify you of "cable disconnection", so you can easily find the cause. In addition, you can register an icon for the purpose of use, such as "Video conference with Osaka branch office", and you can easily make the necessary preparations just by tapping it.

However, in order to realize these functions, all the equipment in the conference room, such as the display and the conference call system, must be individually connected to the company network. If you cannot connect to the network with existing equipment, you cannot handle it. I realized that office equipment is now entering the era of IoT.

The conference room reservation system is also evolving. One of the reasons for the lack of meeting rooms is that "the person who made the reservation for the time being forgets to hold the room even if the meeting is gone." The company's conference room reservation operation system "SMART ROOMS", which has already been introduced by 380 companies with more than 10,000 rooms, is equipped with an "automatic cancellation function" that cancels reservations if no one enters the room at the reserved time. We aim to eliminate messy meetings by operating without asking questions by IT, such as sounding an alarm before the end of the meeting. With the new function, we are trying to analyze the size of the conference room and the number of people, and use it to design an office that suits the way of working.

"SMART ROOMS" demo screen.Visualize which department has the most meetings, the relationship between the capacity of the meeting room and the number of participants, etc.

At Uchida Yoko, IT-related sales account for 60% of the sales of the entire group. However, "Office design is based on the policy of focusing on materials, shapes, and space design, and designing them so that IT can be integrated into them," said President Okubo. In this exhibition as well, not only the appearance but also the ingenuity to handle the technology as simply as possible was felt in various places.