Grassroots Digital Transformation: How Yanmar Holdings Is Freeing Up Talent by Unifying Drawing Data

‍What "Grassroots Digital Transformation" Means at Yanmar Holdings

Founded in 1912, Yanmar successfully commercialized the world's first practical small diesel engine in 1933. Since then, the company has expanded into a wide range of businesses, including large engines, agricultural machinery, energy systems, and machine tools, establishing itself as a diversified industrial machinery manufacturer. As of 2026, Yanmar employs more than 20,000 people globally and operates over 100 sites overseas.

Yanmar Holdings laid out six strategic priorities as part of its mid-term strategy beginning in 2022, one of which was building a next-generation management foundation to support digital transformation. The Digital Strategy Promotion Department was formed with this mission in mind.

Seomori, Section Chief of the Digital Transformation Promotion Group within the Digital Strategy Promotion Department, explains that simply rolling out digital tools top-down doesn't lead to effective transformation. Instead, Yanmar took a bottom-up approach the team calls "grassroots digital transformation," built on strong commitment from top management. The goal is digitalization that genuinely fits frontline realities, with frontline employees themselves building the literacy and skills to use digital tools effectively.

There's a common argument that digital transformation should be driven top-down through strong leadership commitment. At the same time, Yanmar Group encompasses many different business units, each facing distinct challenges with different optimal solutions, making it difficult to push a single top-down approach across the board. Results depend heavily on the motivation of the people actually doing the work on the ground, so Yanmar also made it a priority to respect and nurture that frontline motivation. Combining top-down and bottom-up approaches became a key factor in achieving the company's mission.

Unifying Fragmented Systems to Achieve "Activation of Talent"

In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment, many companies face pressure from labor shortages and currency fluctuations. Even under these conditions, sustainable growth requires stable earnings and reliable product and service delivery. Yanmar aims to improve quality, cost, and delivery, along with customer value, by shifting limited working hours toward higher-value tasks.

Kono, who leads day-to-day execution within the Digital Transformation Promotion Group, describes the challenge Yanmar faced:

{{quote-1}}

‍

Drawings in particular presented a range of challenges. During the development phase, when product costs are largely determined, it was difficult to make use of historical drawings and cost data. Yanmar also lacked the ability to search for similar drawings, which made it harder for younger employees to build expertise and led to an overreliance on veteran staff.

{{quote-2}}

‍

Improving efficiency is now the baseline expectation. Rather than simply cutting time and stopping there, the goal is to redirect that reclaimed time toward more essential, creative work such as advanced analysis and negotiation. Achieving this kind of talent activation requires changing existing workflows and processes on the ground, and change often draws pushback. To realize grassroots digital transformation, Yanmar needed a partner who would do more than present an idealized vision. The company wanted a partner who would work alongside its teams.

Piloting CADDi, the Manufacturing AI Data Platform, at Yanmar

Kono describes how Yanmar came to pilot CADDi, the manufacturing AI data platform, and its application, CADDi Drawer, a cloud tool for manufacturing data utilization:

{{quote-3}}

‍

Yanmar already had strong top-level commitment to digital transformation, and the motivation among the employees actually doing the work was high as well. The pilot focused on the upstream parts of the value chain that handle drawing data, primarily development, procurement, and cost departments. The team included volunteers from each department, along with promotion leads from Yanmar Holdings and customer success support from CADDi, forming a group of roughly 50 people in total. The team held regular meetings, set KPIs and milestones, and evaluated the pilot against criteria such as whether it addressed existing pain points and whether it delivered an ROI of 100% or more.

Talent Activation and Change Among Younger Employees

Yanmar ran the pilot for roughly six months. The results showed strong potential for efficiency gains and standardization across the cost, procurement, development, quality control, and quality assurance departments. Search, selection, evaluation, information sharing, and training all became more efficient, with expectations for further gains through drawing standardization, reuse-based design, and greater cost awareness.

Other qualitative benefits included improved skills and motivation among younger employees, as veteran expertise became documented and explicit knowledge. Keyword and similarity searches on text within drawings were used frequently, and similarity search in particular made a strong impact.

The cost department had previously struggled to efficiently find similarly sized parts when preparing cost estimates. With CADDi Drawer's similarity search, the team could search across parts of different sizes linked to cost data, enabling rapid analysis of the relationship between weight and cost. This made it possible to efficiently identify whether there was a gap between expected and actual costs, and to investigate why. Analysis that had previously been difficult became achievable, freeing up time for higher-value work. In other departments, teams explored relationships such as part length versus cost, and positive feedback and new use cases continued to emerge from the field.

Beyond the cost department, motivated younger employees in particular shifted toward using time saved through automation for analysis and higher-value work, a clear example of talent activation. Information registered in CADDi Drawer also became a shared language that breaks down barriers between departments, and sharing hyperlinks by email made cross-team communication more active. The impact goes beyond simple labor savings, extending to a real shift in mindset and culture among participants.

"There's No Template for Transformation": Realizing Yanmar's Digital Transformation Through Both Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches

Through the CADDi pilot, Yanmar confirmed that breaking down barriers between departments allowed frontline employees to take ownership and drive change themselves. Going forward, Yanmar plans to expand these best practices to other business units and pursue optimization across the entire value chain, including global supply chain transformation and the engineering chain. These efforts are central to achieving Yanmar's mid-term strategy.

Seomori closed with these thoughts on transformation and what lies ahead: every company has its own history and culture, so there's no single template that works for everyone. Rather than dismissing the analog methods the company has relied on, Yanmar wants to respect them while using digital technology to make them better, working through that process together with the people on the ground. Changing how things are done often causes a temporary dip in efficiency, so it's natural for frontline employees to feel some resistance. To keep initiatives from stalling because of that, Yanmar focuses on helping people understand the purpose behind the work as they move forward, identifying employees who want to take on digital challenges, supporting them, and connecting them across the organization to build company-wide momentum. What the company gained from this pilot is a valuable asset, one it plans to scale across other business units to maximize the impact for the group as a whole.