KIMURA KOUGYO Co., Ltd
Ushiku city, Ibaraki prefecture
General Manager of Construction, Director
Mr. Toshihiko Mashino
Hitachi Construction Machinery came to see us to talk specifically about our needs. Previously, we also used the “Full Support” provided by other vendors at another site, but we chose Hitachi Construction Machinery at this site thanks to their passionate team-work based approach of “Let’s work on information construction for the future.” It is this high level of enthusiasm that makes them leaders over the others, and why we rate them very highly.
Hitachi Construction Machinery, which can do everything in any way and responds to our exact needs thanks to the quality of their on-site agent, is great for small and medium-sized civil engineering companies like ourselves. Eventually, however, we expect to separate out all of the work flow and start to use outsourcing methods in part. To that end, we feel it is necessary to accumulate know-how in-house and work on developing our human resources. Then change the consciousness of the workplace over time taking into account of what can be manufactured in-house. Now that we are in this transition phase, we need both “full support” and “partial support” based on what the site agent can deliver.
The record heavy rains in September of 2015 (mainly in the Kanto/Tohoku areas), where over 200m of the embankment on the Kinugawa River collapsed, around a third of the city of Joso (40km2) was completely flooded out, and in Ibaraki prefecture where more than 5,000 homes were destroyed is still fresh in my memory.
In the Kinugawa river basin, the “Kinugawa Response Project” was opened, and on the hardware side, embankment maintenance, leakage countermeasures, river channel excavation etc. were carried out.
“H28 (2016) Excavation work on the upper river section of the Mitsukaido Ohashi Bridge” was a project that KIMURA KOUGYO Co., Ltd worked on – not as a project for i-Construction – however it was a job that the company decided to bid on as an i-construction project, and was given the work accordingly.
Hitachi Construction Machinery conducted groundwork surveying and conducted support for the company in each work flow area. Hitachi Construction Machinery ‘s ICT solution is to maximize the use of the customers’ know – how and to optimize methods through collaborative team work.
“I am very happy cooperating with Hitachi Construction Machinery as we move forward. For this work site, we asked HCM to carry out the surveying of the groundwork etc. using UAV (drone applications) and 3D point cloud data. We did the design and work planning etc. in-house using 3D data creation, but even here we were given great advice as well. The machinery and the accompanying ICT was also all rented from HCM. This has made it possible to decrease the work time required, lessen the staffing model by between six to eight workers, and not need a 20m pitch stake as would have been necessary on past conventional projects.
There are companies that just entrust all of their information construction needs to a construction consulting company, however “In addition to the fact that there is too much work placed on the site managing agent, any additional requests for sudden design changes etc. from the customer/supplier can sometimes be too much for them to handle. For KIMURA KOUGYO, we believe in being the ‘Prime contractor’ with anywhere from 1-10 staff depending on the work involved being engaged in the project in order to keep a firm control on the work involved. The HCM ICT solution looks like it should be able to respond well to these important points with great detail, and therefore I would like use HCM support from now on.”
