SmartMat, which operates the IoT inventory management system “SmartMat Cloud,” announced its Series C round funding on the 10th. In this second close, they conducted a third-party allotment of shares to MLC Ventures, the CVC fund of Mitsubishi Warehouse, and raised funds through loans from Shizuoka Bank and Hokkoku Bank. The amount raised in this round is about 400 million yen, which will be used for product development, recruitment, and advertising expenses. The company’s total funding has reached 3.5 billion yen.
SmartMat has been providing the inventory management and process improvement DX solution SmartMat Cloud since November 2018.
SmartMat Cloud is an IoT service that continuously places items on a smart mat and counts the number by weight. It automates daily inventory checks, stocktaking, and ordering for everything from parts like screws to auxiliary materials, work-in-progress, powders, and liquid raw materials. It reduces the burden on the workplace and allows focus on more important tasks, while making decision-making easier as data becomes visible, calculating appropriate inventory levels for preventing stockouts and meeting delivery deadlines, contributing to management improvement.
With over 1,800 companies implementing it, in addition to the service industry (medical, food, accommodation), recently, more than half of Japan’s leading manufacturing companies, particularly in the automotive and chemical industries, have implemented it. It achieves labor-saving and advancement by completely automating tasks that traditionally required significant manual labor, such as stocktaking, real-time actual inventory understanding that was impossible with manual labor, and ordering.
SUBARU, which implemented it, realized 1.5 times cost-effectiveness by understanding in real-time the inventory of parts with difficult consumption forecasts. Nitto Denko digitalized and visualized the management of equipment scattered throughout the factory, including clean rooms, moving away from personalized management. Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems reduced stocktaking time, reduced work hours related to stockouts, stocktaking, and ordering, and realized automation of each department remotely.
The product lineup includes a variety of options such as A6 size, A5 size, A4 size, A3 size, 500kg mat, and multi-mat, which can be selected depending on the materials to be managed. For example, the A6 size mat has external dimensions of 14.8 × 10.5 × 3.5 cm, a load capacity of 2kg, and can manage small items such as screws, terminals, and small boxed pharmaceuticals.
via PR TIMES
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