CSO (Chief Standardization Officer) Message

The CSO’s Role in Pursuing Planetary Health

The Shimadzu Group is pursuing Planetary Health—the Well-Being of Mankind and the Earth. Under the new Medium-Term Management Plan, the Group is also advancing the international standardization of advanced analytical and measuring methods as a key initiative.
Standardization enhances compatibility, quality, performance, safety, and convenience across products and services. This requires standardized analytical and evaluation methods, which in turn support safe and secure living through the monitoring and assessment of environmental pollution. Analytical and measuring instruments play a broad role in these standardization efforts. For the Shimadzu Group, whose core business is analytical and measuring instruments, standardization is central to our mission and is an initiative directly linked to the Pursuit of Planetary Health.
At the same time, standardization typically takes three to five years, but in an environment of accelerating technological change, a faster and more responsive process is required. It is also important to anticipate the standards that society will require in the near future and act proactively. My role as CSO is to build these frameworks across the Shimadzu Group and drive a standardization strategy that advances the Pursuit of Planetary Health.

Review of the Previous Medium-Term Management Plan

Looking back on the three years of the previous Medium-Term Management Plan, we achieved three major outcomes. First, international standards, including ISO and ASTM International standards, were issued through standardization projects in which the Shimadzu Group had actively participated. These standards are contributing to materials analysis and water quality testing. We have also launched standardization projects aimed at addressing social challenges such as microplastics and PFAS, fluorinated organic compounds that raise health concerns, including carcinogenicity.
Second, we established a global framework for advancing standardization across the Shimadzu Group. The framework spans five locations—Japan, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and China—and advances international standardization each year based on selected themes.
Third, the standardization strategy has become more deeply embedded across the organization. By positioning standardization strategy within the previous Medium-Term Management Plan, we raised both awareness of and commitment to standardization across the Shimadzu Group. Internally, collaboration between standardization and intellectual property has advanced, while externally we have seen more proactive standardization projects emerge through collaboration with customers and academia.
At the same time, standardization requires large volumes of analytical data, and as these activities expanded, resource constraints—including talent—became more apparent. We are addressing this by strengthening internal capabilities and expanding external collaboration.
For example, in North America, we are collaborating with government agencies and major contract analytical service providers to develop new analytical methods. Through these efforts, we aim to accelerate the market deployment of standardized analytical methods and enhance the Shimadzu Group’s corporate value.

Toward Our Vision for 2035

Under the previous Medium-Term Management Plan, we strengthened regulatory response capabilities, improved visibility into regulatory developments, supported product development and launches at the optimal timing, and advanced projects through external collaboration to capture new business opportunities.
Under the new Medium-Term Management Plan and our vision for 2035, Shimadzu Vision, we will further deepen and integrate these efforts so that we can track potential regulatory developments from the earliest stages. At the same time, we will formulate a strategy that turns standardization activities into business opportunities and establish a structure capable of executing it proactively.
Building the necessary systems, strengthening the organization, and developing talent are all critical priorities in achieving our 2035 vision. To identify and shape regulatory and standardization themes based on social challenges, it is essential to enhance our proprietary AI tools and use them to improve the efficiency of application development. It is also important to work with customers who will use these applications from the standardization planning stage so that standards are more practical and the insights gained can be linked directly to instrument development, resulting in more user-friendly systems.
Talent development underpins all of these efforts and is critically important. The International Standardization Group is leading study sessions that share practical know-how ranging from the fundamentals to working with external organizations and the etiquette of participating in international meetings, while developing talent with the skills needed to draft standards and negotiate effectively. We are also developing talent capable of advancing standardization in close collaboration with customers, and we regard talent as the source of value creation.

Standardization Strategy as a Milestone

One of the initiatives for enhancing the management foundation under the new Medium-Term Management Plan is regulatory response and international standardization. The International Standardization Group, established at the start of the previous Medium-Term Management Plan, will continue to lead these efforts by supporting standardization projects across business divisions, coordinating with overseas sites, and advancing standardization through centralized visibility into activities.
Standardization is also closely linked to our Open & Close Strategy. While standardization is fundamentally an open strategy, it also requires clear decisions on what should be protected through intellectual property rights and what should be opened strategically. We are therefore promoting collaboration between intellectual property strategy and standardization strategy from the earliest stages of development and embedding these practices and discussions across the organization.
Through these efforts, we aim to provide not only standardized analytical methods and instruments, but also end-to-end solutions that include sample pretreatment systems, reagents, and other required elements, delivering greater convenience, greater value, and a superior customer experience to a broader range of customers. We hope you will continue to follow the Shimadzu Group as we embody our Corporate Philosophy of “Contributing to Society through Science and Technology” through standardization and continue our Pursuit of Planetary Health.