New technologies that enable content to be personalized through the use of social media, mobile devices, and analytics are transforming every aspect of the customers’ experiences. As the value of these new technologies becomes increasingly important to the outcome of service use and the overall experience or using services, it is imperative that companies leverage new technologies such as AI, IoT, VR, AR, and drones to build a sustainable competitive advantage. This paper introduces NEC’s DX concept and strategy consulting services, which is a digital transformation (DX) offering that enables companies to identify issues in DX promotion, plan strategies to effectively implement DX, and develop a roadmap for the realization of DX.

Design thinking and service design are well-known approaches to creating new businesses and achieving business innovation in a VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Since the 1980s, NEC has been incorporating design-driven approaches and applying its experience-based knowledge of business processes and organizational structures to the creation of a wide range of businesses. More recently, NEC has applied a design-driven approach to its digital business design methodology and has been offering it to customers through its DX Design Consulting Service that was launched in April 2021. In this paper, we introduce Future Creation Design — a DX offering that is offered through the design consulting service for the purpose of accelerating new business creation and business innovation for our customers.

Government interventions aimed at mitigating the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic have devastated the event industry. Sports, concerts, theme parks, and museums or galleries have all struggled in the face of restrictions that limit the number of people who can attend — or, in some cases, preventing any people from attending at all. In an effort to bring back the crowds without creating viral clusters, NEC is creating event environments centered around a variety of sophisticated preventative measures for COVID-19 that offer an enhanced sense of safety and security, giving people the confidence to attend in person, thereby increasing the number of visitors. More than this, NEC has developed new ways to enrich the live experience by building a hybrid environment of online and real worlds. By restoring event facilities to their places as entertainment hubs and community activities, NEC hopes to revitalize COVID-ravaged communities. By effectively implementing fan marketing to create devoted fans of the community and by encouraging event visitors to actually go out and experience the host community, NEC is confident that one-time visitors can be induced to return again and again. All of this is packaged in what NEC calls Event Vitalization DX Offering Suite, an integrated set of event and community solutions that will help towns and cities leave the pandemic behind and begin life anew.

Due to the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19), safe and secure management of airports is now more important than ever before, especially in cities where tourism is essential. To carry out effective mitigating countermeasures while maintaining existing airport operations, digital transformation (DX) is critical and solutions addressing urgent issues are quickly needed. As solutions for infection control at multiple airports to ensure safe and secure operations for both passengers and airport employees, NEC has begun to provide services that fully leverage our accumulated biometrics and video analytics technologies. This paper introduces DX offerings in airport facilities management that utilize biometrics and video analytics.

Recently, in the field of urban/area development, companies cannot simply continue to provide services limited to the conventional real world due to changes in the external environment, such as lifestyle changes caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) and the proliferation of online services. In this paper, we will focus on digital transformation (DX) in the urban and real estate fields, something which advanced companies have recently begun to address, and how DX can be applied to provide personalized services to customers, realize a seamless customer journey, and optimize space through data collection, data linkage, and utilization. In addition to describing those three initiatives and related cases, we will also introduce NEC’s Urban and Real Estate DX Suite and core data platform services that are realizing those digital transformations.

Although many companies are working on digital transformation (DX), few are successful, and the causes of this and possible solutions are being studied and discussed. In this paper, we will describe the challenges and responses that we have found through the vaccination facilitation project of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) as well as their solutions, and then we will summarize the contents that we infer are necessary to maximize the results of DX. We will also introduce the DX offerings we have prepared based on our learnings.

Partly due to the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic, the digital shift is advancing on a global scale and greatly changing social values as well as individual values. To deal with this situation, companies now must acquire agility against change and greater resilience in business. NEC is no exception; the company is also making efforts to maximize the performance of NEC’s human capital by providing employees with office environments worth working in that are not only conducive to work but also increase job satisfaction by fully using technology in the corporate infrastructure as well as through cultural and institutional designs. This paper introduces various innovative solutions developed by NEC and also our DX offerings that we provide to our customers by making the best use of those innovations.

At the construction, operation, and maintenance sites of capital-intensive industries involving infrastructure and plant development, civil engineering, and building construction, aging facilities, information distribution and isolation, as well as manpower shortages are issues. There is an urgent need to improve the efficiency and optimization of field operations through digital transformation (DX). In field service management, it is important to obtain a sense of acceptance from the field staff and align the direction of the digital transformation with that of the DX and the information systems departments to achieve overall optimization. This paper introduces NEC’s approach to this process. As concrete examples of our shared DX offerings and efforts in co-creation with clients, we will introduce digital plants with the aim to realize digital twins for the plant industry as well as initiatives to support in-house development of digital twins through low-code development.

Today Japanese industries are facing the problems of labor shortages and difficulty in transferring specialized skills. With an expectation of being a solution for these problems, local 5G is attracting more and more attention as a key technology in advancing industrial digital transformation (DX). Based on NEC’s accumulated experience in network engineering provided to telecom carriers as well as our knowledge of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) provided to the industrial markets, we now provide our customers with an array of local 5G services as DX offerings. We are strengthening our commitment to making the most of local 5G to promote industrial DX and to producing social value through co-creation with our customers. This paper introduces local 5G, which will accelerate industrial DX and help achieve a prosperous society.

To respond to the rapid changes of recent years, supply chain management (SCM) reform in the manufacturing industry requires a fundamental rethinking. Firstly, from the conventional perspective of individual optimization, we must reconsider the ideal form of SCM as one based on a company-wide perspective of realizing the management strategy of the entire group company. Secondly, these reforms must be actively and highly interwoven with the evolution and deepening of the digital transformation (DX). Lastly, changes in consumer preferences resulting from the new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic, etc. must be taken into account. Based on these three points, it is essential to examine not only technology but also business processes, organizations, and human capital among other scenarios. This paper introduces SCM Advancement Support, a DX offering for promoting the digital transformation of the supply chain.

We are now in the era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) in which severe changes can be constantly expected. In such times, a shift is required from conventional KKD management (relying on kan (intuition), keiken (experience) and dokyo (courage) to make management decisions) in Japan to data-driven management using algorithms and data. This paper discusses the reason why data-driven management has been gathering attention in businesses as well as the issues that customers face with the introduction of data-driven management at their offices. Lastly, this paper also describes a use case of the introduction of NEC’s DX offerings into a customer’s company.

Today, one concept more than any other is driving the way businesses are structuring for the future. Digital transformation (DX) promises to revolutionize everything from products and services to business models. But this transition can’t happen on its own. To get there, companies need workers with the skills and knowledge to understand, manipulate and deploy data and digital technology to meet the needs of customers and society. With DX talent now in high demand, companies worldwide are struggling to recruit competent DX talent, increasing the need for DX human resource development. NEC has launched the NEC Academy for DX, a one-stop service offering solutions for DX human resource development required for the digital age. We will describe that program in this paper and examine a number of case studies conducted at NEC Academy for DX that demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of this program.　

In response to enormous progress in technology as well as the acceleration of the digital shift and the increase in uncertainty triggered by the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic, digital transformation (DX) is now an urgent matter for companies to tackle. To enable companies to promote DX so that they can increase their cooperate value while keeping a clear eye on the direction in which they should go, the transformation of their human capital and organizations that support their DX strategies is essential. In this paper, we will first discuss the type of human capital and organizations that are regarded as necessary for DX and then we will introduce NEC’s DX offerings that support our customers as we accompany them in the digital transformation of their human capital and organizations by leveraging NEC’s accumulated experience in the digital transformation of NEC’s own human capital and organizations.

While companies and other organizations are furthering a commitment to digital transformation (DX), they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, making cybersecurity a more critical management issue than ever before. To help customers better deal with this situation, NEC provides various services and DX offerings to achieve a robust security system required for DX era, while providing all sorts of solutions based on security-by-design principles, in which security is considered and built in from the planning and designing phase. By supporting DX at companies and other organizations, NEC contributes to the achievement of a safe and secure society.

The use of cloud services in corporate IT systems is accelerating because of the advancement of digital transformation (DX), workstyle reform, and conditions during and after the pandemic of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19). With this shift, IT service management is becoming increasingly important for reviewing and improving conventional IT system operations. This paper describes the DX offerings provided by NEC as a solution to achieving the ideal state of IT system operations. We also explain the multi-cloud operation service and DXera monitoring that use ServiceNow, an IT service management system with a global track record in designing digital workflows that underlie NEC’s suite of DX offerings.

Digital transformation (DX) has become a key to survival for organizations. The establishment of IT systems and services that enable organizations to promptly respond to changing business needs is no longer just an option, but a requirement. To rapidly roll out DX offerings to address this challenge and to ensure the safe and stable use of the systems and services offered, NEC has developed the NEC Digital Platform, a common platform that brings together NEC’s strengths. This paper provides an overview of the NEC Digital Platform and also describes the characteristics of its development/execution platform as well as its operation/management functions that enable us to meet a wide range of customer needs.

NEC launched NEC Cloud IaaS as a domestically made, in-house cloud platform service in 2014 and revamped it in 2020 to support the information system security management and assessment program (ISMAP), enhance price competitiveness, and improve platform quality for the company’s DX offerings. This paper will explain how continuing to use domestic clouds as well as in-house clouds is significant, what systems are being developed and how they are operated, and what skill sets are in place as the mega cloud is increasingly being adopted to enable digital transformation (DX). The paper will also discuss future cloud computing initiatives in Japan that leverage these achievements.

Biometric authentication is used every day by people around the world. By linking biometric authentication to all types of digital services in the future, we might be able to provide optimized services for individuals. The role of non-contact biometrics is becoming increasingly important as society shifts to one of non-contact interaction because of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19). In the benchmark tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held in 2021, NEC’s biometric technology ranked first in the world in two categories: non-contact face recognition and iris recognition. This article introduces the features of NEC’s technology for both face recognition and iris recognition that support our DX offerings, multimodal authentication that combines both of NEC’s winning technologies, and possible applications using the core technologies of face recognition.　

Digitization, which makes use of the fact that people, things, experiences, and money continue to be connected by data, is continuing to make progress even in the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19). This paper describes a composable approach to tackle these changes and accelerate growth. A composable approach is an effort to restructure and to recombine the models of society, enterprise, operations, organizations, and systems. This paper outlines the background to explain why such efforts are needed; how these enterprises, operations, organizations, and systems should be constructed to enable these innovations to take shape; and what needs to actually be done to move forward. NEC is supporting our customers as they accelerate their transformation and growth by providing DX offerings that enable them to engage in that final step of composable transition and evolve from a digital shift to a digital transformation (DX).