irodori Shisei Co., Ltd.

Everything we do is for the purpose of creating products that delight customers

Taking "the customer's viewpoint" as our motto, our R&D Department and Manufacturing Department cooperate on organization-building for "co-creation" that strives to create great products, hand in hand.

Mimura:

irodori Shisei has always taken the customer's viewpoint to produce and manufacture products with love. I see fulfilling that role 10 or 20 years down the road as our mission. However, when I asked myself "What can I myself do now to make that happen?", I noted a strength that irodori Shisei boasts over other companies: inter-departmental connectedness . I take the creation of an organization that leverages this strength to be my duty, and devote myself to it day by day.

Yamada:

The relationship between the R&D Department and Manufacturing Department in a typical manufacturing business, not only a cosmetics OEM company like ours, can appear like a relationship of competition – "kyoso" in Japanese – because of differences in roles. However, we engage in organization-building that defines that "kyoso" as the separate word "kyoso" that means "co-creation." I think this is what has enabled us, over our long history, to cultivate strengths not found in other companies.

Abiko:

Without question, the roles demanded of the R&D Department and the Manufacturing Department are completely different. The R&D Department thinks about wanting to make better things, while the Manufacturing Department considers quality and delivery date as it makes products. Both of these do so from the standpoint of the customer, but I came to think that if the difference in the roles demanded of each restricts their mutual goals and if limitations on products' appeal and value appear, our natural culture of inter-departmental connectedness and co-creation becomes a strength we hold over other companies, and, by being leveraged in products, contributes to customer satisfaction.

Yamada:

In the case of a typical vertically administered organization, when the R&D Department says it wants to use some sort of ingredient, the Manufacturing Department would only respond with "yes" or "no." However, our Manufacturing Department thoroughly questions the purpose of the ingredient and the effect of adding it, and feeds back a method that adds some extra merit. Products polished in this way can end up as something more than what we had envisioned.

Mimura:

The roles of each may differ, but I think that it is precisely because every staff member shares the goal of wanting to make products that delight customers that we have inter-departmental connectedness, that co-creation is born, and that we are able to boast of these as strengths. We believe that promoting this sort of environment-building and organization-building leads in the end to customer satisfaction.

Abiko:

I think it's because we have that wish at our core that we're able to take the stance of catching the other side's proposals even when departments differ. There are limits to the ideas that one person can generate. By adding the ideas and proposals of a variety of people, new ideas are born, and 1 plus 1 can result in 3 or even 4... It's because we have that sort of organization that we're able to feed those ideas back to the customer.