WRecently I had a chance to talk with Naoto Izumo, Manager at R&D who led the development team of our SHS or Super Hybrid Sensor, which proved to be the landmark for our weighing business and the core of our sensor technologies for the new generation of our balances, and found out something very interesting.

In June 1997 at AHEMA, the largest scientific instruments exhibition in Europe a number of people from A&D Japan visited to help man the booth set up by A&D Instruments, our European subsidiary. Among them were Izumo-san and Nagane-san who were the key members in the balance development. I had been awaiting this opportunity since I wanted to point to them the need of our own and new sensor while they could see clearly what our competitors had done in terms of sensor development. I recall that the mood was agitational, “Look at their new sensors. Mettler’s Monobloc, and Sartorius’ Monolithec. What is our answer to them going to be?” I was trying to give them a sense of urgency, “We must take action!” I noticed a day later they were sitting at the corner of our booth arguing and scribing drawings as if they were caught up with some ideas in the middle of the show. They stopped manning the booth, and all over sudden, the show place substituted as the workshop at Technical Center. I smiled muttering to myself, “Maybe it has worked.”

Two and a half years later when I saw the SHS, I felt somewhat proud of the fact I cornered them at AHEMA asking very aggressively about our answer to the competition thinking I triggered them to that development. But when I had a chance to chat this time about the development of the SHS with Mr. Izumo, I found myself having been too naïve.

Nevertheless his story turned out to be very interesting and suggestive for our future development. When they came to AHEMA in 1997, his development team just completed the development of EK-H, the strain-gage load cell based balance, which they had taken over from the load cell scale development team. The EK-H was to have been launched as another A&D break-through balance having one part by 100,000 resolution a few years earlier, however, the initial load cell scale team encountered numerous problems and were strapped in a never-ending cycle of trials and errors and had spent two years already. Yutaka Murata, Head of the R&D Division, decided to hand this project over to the balance development team. The balance team meant the team of magnetic force motor sensors, and the scale team meant the strain gauge load cells, but for the first time load cell sensor based product development was handed over to the balance team due to the shear need for its completion.

Though the load cell and the magnetic force motor are both transducers of converting force to electricity, the technical aspects are very different, especially surrounding the mechanical elements. It must have been a very challenging proposal to the balance development team. Mr. Izumo mentioned, “Through the development of EK-H, we learned a lot about the Roberval* structure. It was a mere surprise to us how accurate the Roberval structure could be if properly engineered. We used to think the load cell technology is below the force motor technology in terms of accuracy. This revelation has led us to the SHS development.” This wiped out my credit for SHS development, but it reminded me of the story of Carlos Ghosn who resurrected the dying Nissan. He believes in and executes cross-functional organization. He, through his experiences at Michelin and Renault, excelled in the management by utilizing the expertise of the people crossing the cultural and functional boundaries, who otherwise were buried in the departmental or functional organizations, and later named it cross-functional organization.

Izumo’s case was cross-technical development team. The fact that he had to take over the load cell based development brought him new ways of looking at things. In order to excel in one technology is a great challenge itself, and most often without a deep understanding of one technology, one cannot design anything outstanding in this competitive market, but one can be easily confined to the technology, which results in limiting one's capability. To learn what the guy next to you is doing, and cross over the boundaries of thinking and imagination, could be a source for innovation and lead to breakthroughs. Cross-technical act!

I was somewhat resistant to the naming of SHS since I thought this name would not necessarily challenge the technologies the competitors brought out ahead of us, however, having learnt the story behind the development I have to agree now a hundred percent that it is the right name and the concept and products we brought out by applying SHS were right on for this century as it stands well for the cross-technical development scheme that bore this new remarkable hybrid sensor.

Remarks: * Roberval was the name of French Mathematician who invented a parallelogram structure to eliminate effects of moment when applying a force on a weighing pan. In 1669 Professor Gilles Personne de Roberval of Pairs published a thesis on what he called his static enigma. This was the discovery that equilibrium could exit with his structure even when a weight is placed at different distances from the fulcrum.