Sumitomo Chemical has established SUMIKA DX ACCENT Co., Ltd., a joint venture with Accenture, with an aim to promote new digital projects and nurture digital talent. It started operation today.

Sumitomo Chemical has made “exponential improvement of productivity with digital innovation” one of the basic principles of its fiscal 2019-2021 corporate business plan. As the next step to ongoing initiatives to achieve this principle in R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, and sales/indirect operations, the company intends to bolster its competitive edge via digital innovation, with an intention to ultimately lead it to the creation of new business models. These efforts require its IT unit to cooperate with its business units in considering how the latest digital technologies can be applied to business, and in coming up with solutions suitable for such applications instead of the IT unit’s unilaterally developing a system as required by its business units.