Logistics
Logistical support for Tosoh Group companies falls into four categories. The first is to reduce manpower requirements and improve efficiency. The second is to provide risk management processes and other procedures to upgrade safety and quality. The third is to ensure that shipping terminals and warehouses can meet changing needs and optimize shipping route traffic. The fourth is to support overseas expansion.
The Urethane Division that Tosoh formed as a result of its merger with NPU will benefit from ongoing logistical support. Tosoh’s other businesses will furnish that division with the logistics it needs to integrate its operations and capture synergies. They will also provide logistics to help the Urethane Division and Tosoh Silica Corporation improve their earnings.
General Services
Tosoh has established other, general services businesses to handle personnel management, employee benefit administration, and training. They also encourage subsidiary and affiliate participation in the Tosoh Group salary administration system to further ongoing efforts to raise group-wide efficiency. Tosoh’s general services businesses, moreover, seek to expand and enhance their offerings to optimize the health and safety of Tosoh Group employees.
Analysis and Research
Tosoh’s analysis and research businesses provide an array of sophisticated services to Tosoh Group companies worldwide. These businesses specialize in the organic, inorganic, and polymer chemistry and the electronic materials that underpin Tosoh’s product and application development programs.
They also prioritize bolstering Tosoh’s technical capabilities, brand reputation, and profitability. They accordingly engage in structural analysis, organic chemistry, surface analysis, high molecular weight polymers, and inorganic chemistry for Tosoh Group companies. Around half of their analysis and research is at the Nanyo Complex, while the remainder is at the Yokkaichi Complex and at various Tokyo-based Tosoh operations.
To maintain first-rate analysis and research capabilities, Tosoh annually allots related other businesses a substantial equipment budget. This enables annual installations of state-of-the-art equipment to upgrade analysis and research for the Tosoh Group. And that, in turn, helps those businesses to become more marketable outside the Tosoh Group in striving to become strong, independent profit centers for Tosoh. External sales in analysis and research have edged up in recent years, and there is every expectation that these operations will cultivate more work from external customers going forward.
Information Systems
Other businesses offering information systems services maintain servers, personal computers, and networks across dozens of domestic companies. Their work spans administrative and factory operation systems. And their development of an enterprise resource planning system allows Tosoh management to assess the performance of Tosoh Group members in deploying and employing information systems.
Information systems–related other businesses are tasked with evaluating and introducing technologies, systems, and services. They also maintain and upgrade systems and services across the Tosoh Group and thereby reduce group-wide IT costs.
The other businesses involved with information systems services continue to reinforce the skills of their employees through education. Specific areas of training include learning how to write applications for the group’s core IT systems, acquiring proficiency in diverse programming languages, and cultivating skills in innovation and process improvement.