Shin Yamashita Cures Our Customers’ Pain

It is late evening in Shin Yamashita’s office, be it in Singapore or Germany. The room is bathed in the gentle glow from a desk lamp. Shin Yamashita sits at his desk, surrounded by piles of customer reports, market analyses, and technical drawings. His eyes flick backwards and forwards between his computer screen and his note-covered whiteboards. This is where the Dematic developer is in his element – surrounded by mountains of knowledge, figures, and diagrams. He began his career as a system consultant and in solution development, where he gained an understanding of how systems need to work in harmony. People like him – creative thinkers who are more than just engineers – are the driving force behind the innovations at our subsidiary Dematic. They combine technical knowledge with the ability to think outside the box.

Shin Yamashita’s approach to innovations is as unconventional as it is effective. Instead of relying on ready-made solutions, he begins each innovation process with a thorough examination of the customer’s problems. “Eighty percent of my work is developing my own ideas and interacting with other industry experts,” he explains: “and to come up with ideas, you need knowledge, experience, and an understanding of customers’ pain points and hidden needs.” One of his major projects is a software-driven order fulfillment solution that incorporates the operating principle of the Dematic Multishuttle picking station and a routing solution.. This solution can add any additional functions that are required by simply updating the software and without needing to make any mechanical adjustments. This is how innovation works at Dematic: “It involves brainstorming for the specific case and creative processes,” says Shin.

This process, which Shin describes as the “upstream” process, forms the foundation of his work. He skillfully combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to generate ideas. “Some ideas come to me in a matter of a few hours,” but he admits: “Even if the idea itself is good, it’s worthless if nobody wants it.”

The initial brainstorming session is therefore followed by a critical step: the validation stage. “I talk to industry experts within Dematic,” says Shin about his approach. The idea then emerges from the drawing board and is given a reality check. “We need to find out how practical the idea is for Dematic solutions and how likely it is that it will work.” Shin always keeps the market and the competition in mind, to ensure that the solutions being developed are not just innovative but also help to reduce or overcome customers’ underlying issues.

“The customer doesn’t always tell you the most important thing,” stresses Shin. “They tell you what they want, but as with a patient with a stomach ache, the actual cause could be something entirely different from what they think.” This medical analogy illustrates Shin’s unique approach to solving problems. For example, a customer could be struggling with poor throughput on their conveyor. The customer might think that their conveyor is too slow and want to increase its speed. But perhaps the speed of the conveyor is not actually the cause of the problem, but rather the way in which the conveyor is operated to deal with the required volume, or it could be the workflow in the warehouse, which requires an unnecessary movement. Shin Yamashita digs deeper to get to the root of the problem. So deep in fact that he discovers hidden needs and pain points.

The art of diagnosis goes well beyond superficial solutions. According to Shin, the obvious symptoms – such as the need to reduce costs or speed up processes – are often just the tip of the iceberg. “You need to eliminate the root of the problem as a priority instead of solving the problem,” he explains. This approach results in innovative solutions that not only alleviate the immediate symptoms but also ensure better processes and efficiency for the customer’s company.

A prime example of his approach can be found in his vision for the future of material handling. “In the past our industry was always focused on how to move things. In the future, it will be more a case of how not to move things,” he comments. For him, this new perspective marks a paradigm shift. In the past, innovations in material handling focused on faster conveyors, more efficient automated trucks, or more cost-effective transport methods, but Shin questions these fundamental assumptions. He asks: “What about if we could do away with the movement altogether?”

This way of thinking leads to innovative solutions such as the implementation of software that calculates and minimizes movements. “We can’t reduce movement by 100%, but 50% might be feasible,” says Shin. By optimizing processes and allocating resources intelligently, with Shin’s help Dematic can ease the cause of its customers’ “pain” in a way that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.

This approach at Dematic shows that true innovation is more than “just” technological progress. It involves understanding customers’ deeper needs, thinking creatively, and developing solutions that create real added value. In a world that is constantly changing, at KION we rely on our customer-focused innovation culture.