Workstyle Reform Initiatives

Sekisui House wants all customers who have built their home with us to enjoy living there for many years. So after handing over a new home to a customer, we carry out periodic inspections after the first three months, and then after the first, second, fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, twenty fifth and thirtieth years. There are 30 Sekisui House Customer Service Centers nationwide that handle our after sales services, which include conducting periodic inspections and carrying out repairs and maintenance as required. Over 1,400 staff are placed in Sekisui House organizations, and they provide highly-reliable after sales services that our customers trust and feel reassured by. Since August 2019, we have been using drones, underfloor inspection robots, and robotic cameras designed for attic inspections during the periodic inspections of custom detached houses conducted every ten years. We also started the Smart Inspection system to speedily detect defects, by uploading the images taken by the robots to the cloud and sharing them with office support desk staff who can quickly determine if any defects exist.

The drones and underfloor inspection robots used in the Smart Inspection system can easily be controlled remotely by devices such as a smartphone or tablet, and from any location. This means the inspectors do not have to crawl under floors, climb into attics or directly enter other tricky places, or carry any tools like tripods into the customer’s home, allowing them to avoid possibly dirtying or damaging the home during an inspection. Also, as inspectors do not have to work in high places or under floors, an inspection that normally takes two people around two hours to complete (total of four hours) can be done in less than half the time of just one hour and forty five minutes and by only one inspector. These initiatives are also improving the work environment for inspection staff. Using robots during periodic inspections is expanding the work opportunities for women, seniors and other employees, and helping to mitigate issues in the construction industry such as labor shortages and an aging workforce.