To be a public and global entity has been a strategic objective of A&D since its foundation in 1977. Thus, April 10, 2003 makes a date to remember in our corporate history as we have realized the initial public offering in becoming a publicly listed company through the JASDAQ in Japan. This has strengthened our financial position and given us recognition for what we have accomplished and for where we are heading.

Mr. Furukawa, President and CEO of our company, in the speech he made at the managers’ meeting recently added by saying, “It is one milestone we had to go through in order to keep on moving forward.” Strategic objectives amount to milestones when they are achieved, even though how solid and ultimate the objectives appear to have been once.

Talking about a milestone, the incident I had at ISWM (International Society of Weighing and Measurement), then called NSMA or National Scales Men’s Association comes to mind vividly as a flashback. It was at Portland, Oregon Show in May 1983. Mr. Furukawa, Mr. Kimio Shibata who started the US operation and I were explaining to several scale dealers about the AD-4316, Weighing Indicator, which we just completed and hand-carried to the Show. They came up to our hospitality room to learn about our products over a drink. Probably they were more interested in seeing who we were as A&D was “a nobody” to the US scale dealers then.

It was 1981 when we for the first time attended the IWSM exhibition held in Toronto, Canada, and learned with hardship that the products we designed and were selling in Japan could not sell in the USA. Though I joined A&D as international business manager in the previous year, I quickly came to realize I had no solid products to sell to the US market and had to wait another two years before we had a weighing indicator that suited the US market. The delay was not the result of the technical difficulties but due to limited resources. A&D was too busy making its living as a start-up company, and priority laid with where the daily earnings came, which was then the domestic market in Japan. My plea for exportable products had lower priority in spite of the company’s vision of becoming a global player in the eye of making a daily living.

Finally, now at Portland two years later, we had the product that would give us a foothold in the US market. I was attracting attention as I went on explaining and demonstrating the AD-4316 that had a blue florescent display and was designed based on our own dual-slope analog-to-digital conversion technology. Answering questions raised by the scale people in front of us, demonstrating how they were materialized and resolved one by one, I began sensing this cute unit would sell.

Then a question came, “I noticed there is zero and span interference when calibrating the unit. How bad is it?” “There shouldn’t.” Mr. Furukawa quickly responded. But after repeating the calibration process, all of us recognized there was interference between zero and span. The zero point having been calibrated shifted after the span was calibrated. This means you have to go back and forth calibrating zero and span a number of times until the interference diminishes. I sensed it was news bad enough to dampen their interest and I kept silent searching for help. After a few minutes of silence passed Mr. Furukawa, who had by now removed the PC board from the case and was playing with the unit himself, said with a smile, “It has not been fine-tuned at the factory. It is simply a matter of adjustment.” “We should be able to get rid of the interference between zero and span.”

Both he and Mr. Shibata tested the zero and span and figured out how big the interference was then brainstormed pointing at the trimmers on the board. They scribed some circuitries and did some calculations and figured out how many turns clockwise or counterclockwise the two trimmers had to be rotated in relation to the total turns of the trimmers. (In those days, before surface mount components on a multi-layered PCB, adjusting resistors or trimmers of various resistances did the trick.).

Later I learned they adjusted so that analog and digital zeros coincide, but at that moment under pressure it was magic to me. In retrospect, this incident turned out to be the most effective demonstration of our capability in front of the scale people as the unit worked to everyone’s satisfaction showing no interference between zero and span calibration when tested at various different capacities.

It is a very satisfying to realize we have been continually working with many of those scale people who saw the AD-4316 back then. I believe that the man who raised the question about zero and span was Mr. Rudy Kolaci of Totalcomp, to whom I owe a lot for the success of our weighing business in the USA as well as my own learning about the US business.

In July 1983 the AD-4316 passed the approval in the USA and began selling like hotcakes, as Mr. Jim Story who joined A&D in 1984 used to say. Till then to have a weighing indicator sellable in the USA market was a major objective in my mind, but the hands-on work we had back in 1983 at IWSM Portland converted it to a milestone and laid down the foundation for a lot of milestones to follow. As I went on to get deeply involved with the weighing industry throughout the world, I came to know that this zero and span interference was the biggest headache to scale people then, especially when they installed heavy capacity scales like truck scales. Imagine the headache of moving tons of calibration weights back and forth calibrating zero and span. The AD-4316 removed their fears and brought the solid performance that scale people had been waiting for.

A milestone, large or small, is a thrill to witness adding color to one’s life. It certainly keeps filling up my memory bank, returning as a flashback every once in a while.