Connecting the Field, Technology, People, and a Shared Future Vision

The Meaning of Customer Experience in Facing Increasingly Complex Challenges

The challenges facing industrial sites are becoming more complex than ever. These challenges include maintaining and improving safety and operational stability, strengthening resilience against natural disasters and cybersecurity threats, addressing shortages of skilled personnel and the need to pass on expertise, complying with regulations related to decarbonization and energy conservation, responding to fluctuations in global supply chains, and redefining the roles of people and systems as AI is adopted. These issues are diverse and deeply interconnected. For example, enhancing safety requires looking beyond the reliability of equipment and systems to consider how information is shared and visualized, how frontline workers make decisions, and how decisions are made across the organization. The introduction of AI and automation is not just a means to improve efficiency; it raises new questions about how people understand situations, what decisions should be delegated to the introduced systems, and how roles and responsibilities should be defined. These increasingly complex challenges have become management issues that directly affect business continuity and investment decisions.
Addressing these challenges requires more than simply breaking individual problems down into functions and specifications. It is important to reframe the issues from the perspective of how frontline workers understand situations, make decisions, and take action. In B2B contexts, customer experience therefore cannot be understood solely as the purchasing experience, from awareness and selection to implementation of a product or system. Rather, it should be seen as an experience that spans the entire workflow, enabling frontline workers to understand situations, make appropriate decisions, and continue responding to change as an organization.
Since its founding, Yokogawa has worked closely with industrial sites through measurement, control, and information technologies. Our accumulated knowledge and experience go beyond a history of providing equipment and systems. They reflect Yokogawa’s ongoing collaboration with customers to understand what happens in frontline operations, how people make decisions, and how technology supports operations.
This article explores how Yokogawa uses customer experience design to address challenges and create value.

Transforming Challenges into Shared Questions for Co-Creation

When people hear the word “design,” they may think of the colors, forms, materials, or the visual appearance of a product or interface—in other words, “design as a noun or adjective.” These elements are important because they communicate usability, clarity, and brand identity. However, when facing complex challenges in industrial settings, what becomes especially important is the thinking and process that lead to those outcomes—in other words, “design as a verb.” At Yokogawa, we place great importance on this understanding of design as a verb, which provides a way to reframe challenges together with customers and partners.
Complex challenges are often difficult for stakeholders to share as common concerns. Even when they share the goal of improving safety, different groups—such as management, frontline operations, maintenance, IT, and technology development—may see different challenges and priorities. That is why the first step is not to rush into solutions, but to clarify what should be addressed, share that understanding among stakeholders, and turn it into a shared question.
Design is the practice of transforming complex situations into themes that stakeholders can explore and validate together. By observing the frontline operations, understanding how people make decisions and take action, and visualizing the connections between operations and systems, we identify the underlying challenges behind surface-level requests. We then express these challenges as a shared question—“What kind of experience should we create?”—and make them tangible so that stakeholders can explore possible solutions together.
For example, improving safety is not simply a matter of improving equipment reliability. It also involves how alarms are presented, who makes decisions when abnormalities occur, how teams collaborate, how necessary knowledge is passed on, and what investment decisions are needed to support these efforts. Design helps reframe these elements not as separate issues, but as a shared theme for co-creation: how to create experiences that enable frontline workers to understand the information they need and make decisions with confidence.
Yokogawa’s design approach focuses on transforming complex challenges into questions that can be shared among stakeholders and connecting them to tangible value creation. The next section introduces how this approach is put into practice.

Connecting the Field, Technology, People, and a Shared Future Vision through Design

In customer experience design, Yokogawa places importance on viewing the field, technology, people, and a shared future vision as interconnected elements. We bring together a deep understanding of our customers’ frontline operations gained through years of working closely with them; operational technologies rooted in measurement, control, and information; an understanding of how people make decisions and take action; and future-oriented perspectives on changing business environments. Through this approach, we support value creation that helps customers tackle challenges and shape future business.

Turning Technology into Experiences That Take Root in the Field

Advanced technology takes root as value only when it can be used naturally in frontline operations and supports people’s decisions and actions. Ease of use is one of the key factors that enables such sustained use, but in this context, it does not simply mean that a system is easy to operate. It also means enabling frontline workers to understand situations without confusion, make the necessary decisions, move smoothly to the next task, and coordinate effectively with related tasks and stakeholders. In other words, turning technology into experiences that become embedded in frontline operations means designing experiences that improve operational efficiency and address long-standing workflow challenges.
To achieve this, it is essential to involve customers and partners in co-creation from the early planning stages. We need to understand how the technology will be used in frontline operations, what operational constraints exist, and both the potential and limitations of the technology. We then translate these insights into experiences that align with how users perceive situations, make decisions, and take action. Through this process, we transform technology into experiences that are easier to embed in frontline operations.
This approach is evident in the tangible outcomes we have achieved. Recently, Yokogawa’s CellVoyager High-Content Analysis System CQ3000 and the CT1000S AC/DC Split-Core Current Sensor received the 2025 Good Design Award in Japan. The CQ3000 was recognized for enabling intuitive operation that inspires user confidence, as well as for its language-independent user interface. The CT1000S was recognized for its form, shaped by both the required measurement accuracy and actual use in frontline operations. Both demonstrate how technology and performance can be transformed into experiences that become embedded in frontline operations by starting from actual use and operational workflows.

Designing Experiences That Support Confident Decisions and Stable Operations

In process industries, a halt in production can directly affect business. Safety, operational stability, quality, environmental compliance, and equipment maintenance must all be addressed at the same time. In such environments, it is essential to design not only system performance, but also the conditions that enable frontline workers to accurately understand situations, make appropriate decisions, and coordinate with others.
One representative example is the control room, which is the hub where information from the site comes together, enabling people to understand situations, make decisions, and take action. Even with advanced equipment and control systems, safe and stable operations cannot be achieved without an environment that enables people to make appropriate decisions. This approach is reflected in ISO 11064, the international standard for ergonomic control center design. Based on the principles of this standard, Yokogawa identifies challenges in frontline operations from multiple perspectives through surveys, task analysis, and environmental measurements. Because opportunities to build new control rooms or carry out large-scale renovations are limited, we focus not only on current operational challenges, but also on future workforce composition, work styles, equipment upgrades, and the introduction of digital technologies. In doing so, we define the ideal operating environment together with customers.
As part of a blast furnace renovation project at JFE Steel Corporation’s West Japan Works (Kurashiki Area), Yokogawa helped co-create the working environment both inside the control room and across the entire blast furnace center floor where the control room is located. The aim was to create a safer, more inclusive, and more comfortable working environment. This project illustrates how we co-created an environment that supports operations together with customers and partners, based on an assessment of current conditions and feedback from users.

Shaping Future Business Opportunities through Co-Creation

The approach introduced so far can also be extended to new business creation. Some complex challenges have not yet been recognized. In future-oriented design exploration, we form hypotheses about changes in the field, technology, people, and society, and then work backward to identify the themes that should be addressed now. For example, what decisions will people be responsible for in environments where advanced AI and automation are used? What will be required for operations and maintenance as decarbonization progresses and the workforce changes? In what kinds of operations and business models will technology create value? Through these questions, we explore business opportunities that are difficult to see as a simple extension of current thinking.
This perspective is also useful when linking core and applied technologies to business value. Rather than focusing only on how technologies can be applied in today’s market, we also consider what challenges may emerge at future industrial sites and in society, and what kinds of experiential and business value those technologies can create within that context. This makes it easier to share the direction of technology development, hypotheses for product and service development, and the potential for new business models with stakeholders.
The more uncertain a future becomes, the harder it is for any single company to envision it alone. By bringing together customers’ insights from the field, Yokogawa’s operational and control technologies, its understanding of human judgment and behavior, and external partners’ technologies and services, we can identify questions to address and themes to explore. Future-oriented design exploration is not about predicting the future, but about considering what products, operating environments, and business opportunities should be co-created now.

Creating Business Value through Co-Created Customer Experience

As we have seen, the greater the changes in industrial sites and business environments, the more customer experience needs to be understood as extending beyond the use of products or systems. It is important to consider customers’ work, operating environments, decision-making, future business plans, and even their relationships to social issues. Stakeholders from the field, technology, business, and partner organizations need to bring together their respective insights and jointly consider what kind of experience should be created.
In this process, design plays the role of bringing together stakeholders’ insights and challenges and framing them as shared questions and hypotheses. Customer experience design is not something carried out by the design department alone. It is a practice that brings together the perspectives of the field, technology, people, and business, transforms products and services into meaningful experiences for customers, and translates them into business value. Through this kind of co-creation, we support customers and partners in taking their next steps.

 

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