Materials to read before the casual interview/Technical interview

2024/11/15 9:452024/11/19 11:56

Thank you for your interest in CADDi! My name is Tanaka, and I am the manager of the engineer recruitment team.

This page is intended to give you a general understanding of the challenges we face and our business. I hope you will take the time to read this page before a casual meeting or interview.

①About Us ②Challenges we face
③Products we offer
④Future Product Strategy
⑤The world after the issue is resolved
⑥More information（Related contents)

①About Us

CADDi is a startup company founded on November 9th, 2017, so is currently in its eighth fiscal year.

◆Summary of the 7-year transition since the company's founding

CADDi was co-founded by CEO Kato and CTO Kobashi on November 9, 2017, and started its business with an automatic estimation service for 3D drawings.

Subsequently, the company launched a 2D drawing ordering and receiving platform business (CADDi Manufacturing business)

By 2022, the business has expanded to three countries (Vietnam, Thailand, and the United States). In the same year, CADDi Drawer was officially released.

In July 2023, the company raised a large Series C financing, totaling 21.7 billion yen.

In July 2024, the company announced the business integration of CADDi Manufacturing and CADDi Drawer, which is now in its second founding phase as **Data Platform Business. **

②Challenges we face

As a company that develops products for BtoB in the domain of “manufacturing,” which is unfamiliar to most candidates, CADDi is often wondered what kind of company it is working on. Here, we will explain the challenges that CADDi faces in the manufacturing industry and what kind of world it is aiming for.

What kind of industry is the manufacturing industry that CADDi is facing?

The manufacturing industry is actually an industry that is very familiar and relevant to everyone.

For example, the trains and cars you use to commute to work, the PCs and smartphones you use at work, and even the rice balls you buy at the convenience store every morning are all produced by industrial machinery and processing companies.

Manufacturing is the world's largest industry, with a market size that is said to be worth as much as 2,000 trillion yen globally. (* Even if we focus only on Iot, the size of the manufacturing market is almost as large as Japan's nominal GDP.)

What problems are occurring in the manufacturing industry?

Although the manufacturing industry is such a huge industry, it is actually facing various problems on site.

The president of a local factory who cannot spend time on manufacturing

For example, imagine “local factory presidents” as seen in movies and dramas. They are specialists with very advanced technical and developmental skills, but they usually do not have enough time to spend on manufacturing.

They spend most of their time responding to the dozens of requests for quotations and inquiries that manufacturers send them on a daily basis, and they do not have sufficient time to devote to manufacturing.

Procurement staff who are busy dealing with problems

On the other hand, what about the “manufacturers' procurement staff” who ask such “local factory presidents” for quotations? In fact, they too are facing a very difficult situation. Although they would like to devote their time to more advanced procurement tasks such as procurement strategies, in reality they are said to be losing more than 70% of their time because they are too busy dealing with the daily delivery delays and troubles that occur.

Sites where DX does not proceed

Although there is a recent demand for digitalization and efficiency, faxes and paper drawings and documents are still used in the manufacturing industry.

Many people have an image of the industry as being behind in DX.

These problems occur not only in Japan, but also in other parts of the world, and have remained unresolved for more than 100 years.

We believe that this is not due to individual abilities, but to the industrial structure.

Why do manufacturing problems continue to occur?

CADDi considers the various problems that continue to occur on site as a problem of industrial structure, which is another level of abstraction. (*This is the part of the document we want you to understand the most!)

1. Individual optimization tends to be promoted

Because “manufacturing” is not completed in the digital world, there is an incentive to do things between physically close relationships for the sake of actual manufacturing.

For example, even the top manufacturers of automobiles and semiconductor manufacturing equipment concentrate the majority of their suppliers within a 10-minute drive of each other, building close relationships with so-called “neighborhood suppliers” that last for 50 or 60 years.

In addition, it is very rare that manufacturing is actually completed by one or two companies, and it is necessary to cooperate with a variety of companies and numerous stakeholders.

Therefore, because a single change can affect all subsequent processes, there is an incentive to focus only on what can be solved within one's own department, with as little impact on others as possible.

Thus, the manufacturing industry is becoming more and more individually optimized in every part of the industry.

2. Increased data silos (fragmentation)

When individual optimization occurs, data fragmentation inevitably increases.

For example, there are many cases, even within the same company, where the “procurement department” does not have access to data held by the “design department,” or the “design department” does not know data held by the “manufacturing department.

These occur between factories and factories, between suppliers and manufacturers, between subordinates and supervisors, between past and present personnel, and so on.

3. Reinvention of the wheel happens in various places

The fragmentation of data causes frequent reinvention of the wheel, even though the work has been done before. We end up executing the same thing from scratch every time, encountering the same problems, and scrambling to solve them in the same way.

For example, even in situations where a new model is being developed that is similar to a model that has had a problem once before, the “design” team often does not know the information on quality defects that “manufacturing” has. Thus, the same kind of design is made as last time, and when the product is passed to manufacturing a few months later, the same kind of quality trouble is encountered again and again.

CADDi's vision of the world that we are trying to achieve

The manufacturing industry has been repeating the same problems for more than 100 years without solving them due to the structure of “individual optimization,” “data silos,” and “reinventing the wheel.

CADDi aims to move away from this structure where the wheel is continuously reinvented from scratch, to a world where daily data, operations, transactions, etc. are accumulated as assets, and past assets are leveraged to advance business operations.

And by creating a loop of capitalization, we aim to release the “manufacturing potential” that has been buried until now.

③Products we offer

Since the above has provided a general overview of the manufacturing problem, this chapter will explain what approach C ADDi is actually trying to use to solve the problem.

What is the most important data in manufacturing?

In order to break out of data silos, CADDi aims to connect and organize all the data that exists in the manufacturing industry into a state that can be leveraged.

The fastest way to connect all the data is to tie the most important data to the surrounding data. So what is the most important data in manufacturing? It is the blueprint data called “drawings.

Drawings are very important data that are referenced in almost every process in the manufacturing industry. However, despite being such important data, drawings have a major problem: they are not structured data.

Because drawings are distributed in two-dimensional data such as PDFs and TIFs, all the information on them is a single unstructured image data.

So, for example, even fulfilling a request to “find a product of about 40 mm in length, with a part name of shaft and material of iron, and steel as the material” from a group of drawings made in the past is a challenge.

CADDi has developed “CADDi Drawer” with these “drawing” issues as its hook.

What does CADDi Drawer achieve?

Launched in 2022, CADDi Drawer “converts drawings into structural data” → “by tying various other data to the drawing data” → “creating a loop that improves daily operations.

Convert drawings to structural data

Here is a demo video of CADDi Drawer.

As shown at the beginning of the video, PDF and other two-dimensional image data is replaced by image analysis technology to replace important data such as product shape and size information, material and surface treatment instructions, and drawing numbers into a structural form.

Connect and utilize various data to the drawing data

Once structural data can be replaced, it is possible to link drawings with various other peripheral data, such as order performance and quality defect data.

This makes it possible, for example, to collectively reference a variety of information tied to past drawings in a “design/manufacture of a model similar to a model made in the past” situation.

If quality defects have occurred, the designer can improve the drawings before sending them to manufacturing. Based on the amount of past orders, the budget can be assembled without obtaining estimates this time.

In this way, operations that used to occur repeatedly can be made unnecessary and evolve into more sophisticated operations and processes.

Is CADDi Drawer going well?

The growth curve in the two years since its official release has been one of the best in the world, and in that sense, we are off to a good start. We have already been introduced by a variety of top manufacturers, and we are expanding to the United States and ASEAN countries from 2024.

On the other hand, however, it has only been two years since we started, and expansion from here on out is extremely important.

CADDi's goal is to reform the entire manufacturing industry, and this is not limited to Japan.

Google's sales in FY2023 were US$305.6 billion. When CADDi truly changes the world, the scale will be on a whole different level from what it is today.

④Future Product Strategy

Explain the future development of the product and the strategy for growth.

CADDi as a data platform

CADDi Drawer aims to be more than just a drawing management SaaS. We aim to be a data platform that aggregates all data in the manufacturing industry and is used globally as a matter of course.

However, there are a number of issues that must be resolved to make the data platform a reality. One is how to create an entry point for data. The other is how to prepare an exit to utilize the collected data.

How to create an entry point for data

The first step is the data entry point. Even though it is called a platform, it is not easy to ask users to upload data to it. It is essential that users have an incentive to upload data, so the design of the entry point is very important.

In addition, because of the real world that exists in the manufacturing industry, there are many areas where information and findings have not yet been converted into data.

The second product, CADDi Quote, released in 2024, was developed as the first step to break through these barriers.

Until now, quotations between manufacturers and suppliers have been done by fax, telephone, or e-mail with Excel attachments. In addition to being inefficient in itself, this type of work has the problem of quotation data being buried in individual emails and not being stored.

CADDi Quote solves these problems with technology and allows users to work on the application to accumulate information on quotations that could not be converted into data before.

How to prepare an exit to utilize the collected data

CADDi Quote also serves as an outlet at the same time.

As quotation data is accumulated, other data will be connected within CADDi Drawer, making it possible, for example, to use AI to assist in selecting suppliers when requesting quotations, or to analyze room for price reductions.

CADDi Quote has the potential to stand alone as a company, but we are also planning to simultaneously develop a number of products as a layer that actually delivers value while utilizing the data collected on this platform.

We are planning to provide many applications in the next few years, and one of our major business challenges is to gather talented members, including engineers who will develop these products and field sales staff who will actually spread them throughout the world.

Why can CADDi solve a problem that no one else in the world has been able to solve?

CADDi is taking on the challenge of solving a problem that no one else in the world has been able to solve for over 100 years. It is, as we have described, a challenge of industrial structure and a great challenge that will revolutionize the manufacturing industry.

However, we are convinced that this challenge can only be met by CADDi in the world.

Various problems in the manufacturing industry start with “individual optimization”. We need to approach this problem as a horizontal infrastructural entity, because if we actually go into the transaction and enter as one player, we end up reproducing the same structure. (*This is evident from the fact that even at a scale as large as Toyota's, they still have not been able to standardize the world in the Toyota way.)

On the other hand, it is not as if we can solve problems by taking a horizontal approach. The manufacturing industry has a long history as an industry, and solving issues onsite requires very deep domain knowledge of each business area.

Therefore, to change the manufacturing industry as a whole, a combination of a “cross-sectional approach” and “deep domain knowledge of the manufacturing industry” is necessary.

CADDi has experienced firsthand the difficulties of manufacturing in the course of advancing the manufacturing business, which is our ancestor's business. CADDi has the know-how and human capital cultivated through this experience.

In addition, through the business integration in July 2024, we have switched to a data platform approach.

We will change the world by incorporating the manufacturing know-how we have cultivated in the Manufacturing business into CADDi Drawer as software. This is exactly what CADDi is going to do.

⑤The world after the issue is resolved

When CADDi changes the manufacturing industry, what kind of world will it be?

Veterans and newcomers can work hand in hand to make their work more creative and enjoyable.

People, companies, and countries that are not making the most of their strengths will be able to maximize their own strengths.

Better products will be made faster, with fewer resources, and more sustainably.

Better products will be distributed at lower prices, enriching the lives of consumers.　etc…

Countless changes will be made.

In addition, I believe that there is a possibility that things will happen beyond what we can imagine at this point in time.

I wonder if you were able to imagine your current lifestyle before the smartphone came out. When CADDi becomes an infrastructure for manufacturing throughout the world, innovations that are unimaginable today will be born.

With such delusions in mind, CADDi continues to move forward, solving the problems in front of us in a steady and advance tenaciously.