AOTS Journal 2019 SPRING No.14 (ENGLISH)

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3No. 14 SPRING 2019workshops. Workshops are held once every month and about 300 attendants have nished training so far. I do not know if 300 is too few or too many; it is true our original expert dispatch was a ‘base’ of the current gures and I look forward to seeing more and more SIers (robot systems integrators) being nurtured in Thailand. What do you think you could contribute to Thailand’s industry and society?The government of Thailand approved a 20 billion baht robotic industry promotion plan toward the promotion of robotic and related industries to meet its policy of ‘Thailand 4.0.’ Its Ministry of Industry has a goal to help smaller businesses with higher productivity by installation of robotics and automated systems with low-interest loans while increasing SIer rms, currently 200 to 1,400 within ve years. It is also said in Thailand that their working population will be decreasing owing to a lower childbirth-rate. Accordingly, it should be a mandate for them to pursue more automation and efciency by robotics. The robot academy established by us with TGI is a step further forward than the actual policy measures of the Thai government. We wish to provide Thai industry with our help in human resource development as it shifts from a labor intensive type to high-tech and high added value type industry.How would you like to make use of the current approach?As for Japanese Industry, in order to maintain economic power of a certain level, we have no choice but to seek higher productivity and efciency, therefore it is an urgent question for us to employ more robotics. We, actually, launched the ‘FA & Robot System Integrator Association’ in July last year and I assumed its presidency. This is an organization dedicated to ‘building a network in the FA-Robotics industry mainly Slers’ and ‘the promotion of enhanced expertise on systems integration.’ The market size of industrial robotics has grown to almost the one trillion yen level. If we add the prots from all periphery and other systems, it becomes nearly ten trillion yen. But we have an overwhelming shortage of personnel to receive orders unless we could train sufcient SIers.Even though there has been short-term training of integrators with initiative of the government, we at the association would like to prepare a unied engineering skills standard and training programs for SIers. We also hope to nurture diversied experts such as data analysts and software engineers as well for contributing to Japanese and Thai societies. I tried to boast in Thailand that we had launched such an organization when I visited there but I found they had established a similar organization one year earlier than us. We want to work harder with Thai people.*TGI: A vocational training center jointly established by the governments of Thailand and Germany. Currently it has no assistance from Germany and supports local industries with nancial assistance from the Thai Ministry of Industry.Thailand’s industrial promotion policy ‘Thailand 4.0’ advocates enhancement of productivity by robotics and automation as well as nurturing of an indigenous robot industry itself. Bringing up of systems integrators pioneered by this case has been transferred to the current policy measure of Thailand. AOTS has been undertaking the nurturing of lean automation systems integrators by industry-academy-government partnership including TGI. (By consignment of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, a program to transfer institutions and systems to sustain the economic growth of Japan for a better business environment for Japanese corporations.)Scenery during the instruction in 2013 by Mr. Toshinori Satoh, the expert dispatched (left), with a robot working by programming (right)“Ideally, we need to give opportunities for younger generations like high-school and university students to understand the role of SIer,” said Mr. Kubota.