Japanese System and US Power Supply
Shimazu Corporation delivered a bundle of chemical substance analysis systems to a certain US company in 1986.
But soon the Japanese maker of measuring instruments got a big claim from America. They complained that the analysis systems, expected to run seven days a week, stopped their operation on every Monday morning without exceptions.
As the system was sold well globally, Shimazu had already experienced various problems and situations about operation of the system. So, they promptly sent engineers of its subsidiary company in the US to the site of the client company. They found that it was blowout of a fuse that halted the system. So, they assured the US client that the analysis system would start to work well again by simply exchanging a fuse and connecting it to a power source again. But in the morning of next Monday, the systems all halted. It is a type of malfunction Shimazu never faced in Japan.
So, from the central office in Japan a project manager in charge flew to the site in America. He attached an electricity monitoring device to the power source line of the building of the US company. Then he discovered that the voltage of power supply in the building dropped by half on every week end. It was due to some large-scale construction work being carried out in the area where the building was situated. Shimazu's system had no function to give an alert to users about wrong voltage of external power supply.
Accordingly Shimazu redesigned related circuits of the machine and sent new parts with new circuits to the US client. It took almost just one month till this problem was fixed. They could prevent Shimazu from gaining a bad reputation in the US market.
But in this incident the project manager of Shimazu learnt that he could efficiently cope with the difficult problem since he thought that there must have been something wrong not only in the client but also on the Shimazu side. It was a precious lesson for him.
This project manager later became President of Shimazu Corporation.
Shimazu is also well known to the Japanese public as a company where a Nobel Prize winner works. Koichi Tanaka, an engineer of Shimazu, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 as the first case in Japan that an ordinary employee in a private company won a Novel Prize.
(By reference to The Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper.)
###
