News

Business Engineering Corporation (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Masakazu Haneda; hereinafter referred to as "B-EN-G") announced today that Japan Freight Railway Company (Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Arata Inukai; hereinafter referred to as "JR Freight") has introduced the VR learning system "mcframe MOTION VR-learning" (hereinafter referred to as "VR-learning").
Using this system, JR Freight has established an environment for in-house production and distribution of VR safety training materials that utilize on-site videos. Currently, training materials are produced at a rate of approximately one every two months and provided to freight station managers nationwide. This has created an environment in which employees can deepen their understanding of on-site work that they have no experience with and actively learn.
Going forward, we plan to provide ongoing education to station managers, expand the scope of education, and develop in-house educational materials tailored to on-site needs in order to enhance safety education and raise safety awareness among all employees.

The implementation example has been published at the following URL.
https://www.mcframe.com/case/jrfreight

■ Background of introduction
JR Freight is a railway operator that operates freight railways throughout Japan. Because rail transport involves multiple trains traveling at high speeds on designated tracks, a single accident can result in the loss of large amounts of cargo, widespread suspension of operations, and even serious personal injury. In addition, multiple tasks, such as forklift loading and unloading and vehicle inspections, are carried out simultaneously within freight stations, requiring advanced safety management. Given this background, the company has positioned "safety" as the foundation of its business, but was facing the following challenges regarding the learning outcomes and management of its safety training.

• Traditional group training and video viewing made it difficult to understand the real dangers in real-life situations.
• It was difficult to physically understand the on-site situation, which is something that is rarely experienced in real life.
• Passive learning, such as lectures and watching videos, did not equip employees with the skills to actually take action.
• We were unable to grasp the status of use of teaching materials and attendance records.

■Reasons for choosing VR-learning
As a means to comprehensively solve the above issues, JR Freight selected VR-learning, which allows the company to produce and distribute educational materials using 360-degree footage of the work site.

• A sense of realism that allows you to experience the actual work environment virtually: By using actual work environments filmed with a 360-degree camera as teaching materials, you can experience the "dangers of the work site" in a realistic way that you would not get from static group training or videos.
• Ease of creating teaching materials that cover a wide range of unfamiliar tasks: Because we can increase the number of teaching materials in-house, we can flexibly create teaching materials for tasks that are not actually experienced or rare situations.
• A system that encourages active learning: By combining videos with questions, it is possible to create teaching materials that encourage "active learning" by having participants think and make decisions on their own while simulating unfamiliar work. In addition, by distributing the videos to PCs, etc., participants can study at their own convenience.
• The dashboard function allows administrators to accurately grasp the status of courses.

■Effects of implementation
The introduction of VR-learning has also produced the following effects:

• VR teaching materials can be used to supplement station managers' understanding of work they have no experience with, such as cargo handling work outsourced to group companies, and can effectively cultivate a "safety eye" for on-site hazards.
• The dashboard function allows for centralized management of attendance status at over 100 stations nationwide. This visualizes attendance results that could not be grasped with conventional distributed teaching materials, enabling planned education promotion.
• By distributing to PCs, the burden on instructors during group training is reduced and an environment is created where the teaching materials can be delivered reliably to all participants, including those on shift work.

■Customer comments
Up until now, education has tended to be based on a "teaching" and "making employees memorize," but to improve effectiveness, we wanted to shift to a style where each employee actively "learns" and "memorizes." VR-learning allows us to create teaching materials in-house using 360-degree videos filmed in-house, and by distributing them to PCs and tablets, even employees on shift work can study at their own convenience. Another major advancement is the ability to visualize the learning status. We hope that the immersive VR will supplement understanding even for tasks that employees have no experience in, and will greatly contribute to preventing accidents by cultivating station managers' eye for safety.

■About mcframe MOTION VR-learning
VR-learning is one of the products in the "mcframe IoT" series developed by B-EN-G. Using VR teaching materials created from images taken with a 360-degree camera, learners can train while experiencing the virtual reality through a VR head-mounted display (HMD), and it is used in safety education, work training, and other areas. Since its release in 2017, it has been adopted by over 100 companies across a variety of industries.
For details on mcframe MOTION VR-learning,
https://www.mcframe.com/product/motion/vr-learning
Please see.

■About Business Engineering Corporation (B-EN-G)
Business Engineering Corporation (B-EN-G) supports the digital transformation of its customers, primarily in the manufacturing sector, through IT. The company has extensive experience in consulting and support services, from IT planning to system construction, implementation, and operation, as well as the sales and implementation of its proprietary package software, "mcframe." B-EN-G also helps customers advance their systems and improve operations by utilizing data accumulated from ERP, SCM, IoT, and other systems. With five overseas subsidiaries in China (Shanghai), Thailand (Bangkok), Singapore, Indonesia (Jakarta), and the USA (Chicago), B-EN-G offers products and services to global companies, working closely with them both in Japan and locally to resolve their management challenges. 
For more information, please visit:https://www.b-en-g.co.jp/​

*Company names, product names, etc. mentioned in this news release are registered trademarks or trademarks of each company.