Ebara Manufacturing, matching
their products to the exact requirements of their customers
Ebara Manufacturing, with a history of over 70 years, produces
an extensive range of wind and water pumps for the construction
industry, the water & drainage utilities, petrochemical plants
and nuclear power stations. As part of the Ministry of Trade's Stardust
80 national project, Ebara is also developing revolutionary recycling
technology for the separation of city waste to provide useful products
such as compost, pulp and fuel gas. The company is also active in
environmental protection equipment, producing fume desulphurizers
and dust collectors, and has recently developed a household water
purifier which uses hollow osmotic fibre technology.
The Ebara factory in Fujisawa, Japan, produces mainly small bore
general purpose and industrial pumps. Mr Yutaka Shigeshisa, Manager
of the Production, Planning & Control section explains the problems
of manufacturing such a large and often customized product range.
"Customers often just ask for 'a pump', and naturally without
knowing exact details about our products they are often very vague.
We produce over 3,000 types of pump, and with such a wide variety
even our own staff were having difficulty dealing with customers
enquiries and orders. The manual system was starting to break down
with ever increasing volumes and newer and more sophisticated product's.
Ebara already utilised a computerised order entry system, once
the correct pumps have been identified. They decided to look into
developing a system to automate the process fully, so that any employee
in the sales office could identify the customers requirements quickly
and accurately.
Ten possible packages where evaluated before the XpertRule®
expert system was chosen - supplied by Daiichi Computer Resources
in Japan. The flexibility of the delivery environment was one of
the main initial attractions.
"We already had data on type selection", says Mr Shigeshisa,
"and we were able to enter it into XpertRule in 40 hours".
"This would not have been possible with any other package.
The ease of editing rules just by adding or altering examples of
past decisions was surprising. I don't think we could have built
the system without it. XpertRule not only makes life easy for the
developer, but also creates a final system which is simple to use
for the sales people. Even quite new employees can now specify a
complex special purpose pump by using the system. With XpertRule
you achieve system construction in a short time with excellent expandability".
The operator selects options from XpertRule generated menus of
the possibilities offered, for such things as type of fluid being
pumped etc. The process takes about one minute, and only ten seconds
to react to additional data or changed requirements.
Ebara have distributed the completed system to all their sales
offices, and they see the ease of changing the system specifications
using XpertRule as being a great advantage.
The company now plans to use XpertRule in another area, that of
Planning Support. "The value of an expert system lies in capturing
the knowledge of the company or the individual. XpertRule seems
to be a tool which easily packages that knowledge for the computer"
concludes Mr Shigeshisa.
XpertRule Software products in Japan.
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