News release overview
Development of technology for enhancing resilience of the manufacturing industry supply chain to natural disasters and pandemics
Visualizes procurement risks by using generative AI to extract insight, aiming for more efficient risk management
Figure 1. Overview of manufacturing industry supply chain risk*4 mitigation. The effectiveness of manufacturing site inferencing was demonstrated in this verification trial
Tokyo, March 14, 2025 – Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501; hereafter “Hitachi”) has developed “deep insight inferencing” technology aimed at making the manufacturing industry supply chain more resilient to natural disasters and pandemics. When part supply information such as the type or model of a part, its material, and company supplying it, along with corporate and other information available on a website, is fed into a generative AI model, this technology is capable of inferencing with high precision information about the manufacturing site that up to now has been difficult to discover (Figure 1).
A verification trial of this technology inside the Hitachi Group demonstrated the ability to inference supplier manufacturing site information with greater than 85% accuracy. Up to now, when a parts supply risk incident occurred such as an earthquake or typhoon, collecting and narrowing down the huge amount of information about manufacturing sites from which parts are procured had to be done by human tasks; but this technology reduces that manual work.
Following up, Hitachi in collaboration with Institute for Digital Observatory, the University of Tokyo*1,2 will incorporate early warning signs of risks that may impact the manufacturing industry, will visualize procurement risks, and will seek to improve risk management efficiency, thereby contributing to greater corporate supply chain resilience.
Details of these results are to be announced at the 2nd Open Forum of the Institute for Digital Observatory scheduled for March 17, 2025 on the Hongo Campus of the University of Tokyo.*5
*1 An initiative that will draw up a Grand Design for a resilient society by backcasting from a vision of society and economic activities desired by 2050, and on that basis provide the government and industrial world with analysis results, policy proposals and advice, aiming for social implementation. https://inst-do.adm.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ [in Japanese]
*2 News release dated April 4, 2023, “Establishment of Institute for Digital Observatory, the University of Tokyo—Starts joint research with Hitachi, Ltd. aiming to realize a resilient society and economy” [in Japanese]
*3 Mapbox: OpenStreetMap [in Japanese]
*4 The risk that the operations of companies or organizations involved in the provision of products or services will be impacted by a natural disaster, accident, cyberattack, or other threat, cutting off supply.
*5 https://inst-do.adm.u-tokyo.ac.jp/news/20250213.html[in Japanese]
