en.Wedoany.com Reported - On July 21, 2026, Japanese multinational IT and communications company NEC announced the enterprise transformation concept "Manufacturing Transformation (MX)" for the manufacturing industry, aiming to fully transform the five major value chains—engineering, supply, production, service, and sustainability—into an "AI-native" form. This is not about adding AI to existing operations, but redesigning organizational and business processes on the premise of leveraging AI. Among the five chains, NEC independently added a sustainability chain for processing environmental information, building on the four chains listed in the guidelines of Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

In 2025, the company proposed the "Dynamic Manufacturing" concept, which uses data to connect these five chains and dynamically respond to changes. The newly released MX evolves this concept further by utilizing manufacturing-specific AI agents to support decision-making and business execution. At the launch event, NEC showcased the "current status" of AI-native manufacturing, including internal practices and ongoing demonstration developments. Hirofumi Miyaji, Director of the FDX Group at the Management Consulting Headquarters, stated: "MX aims to shift from human-centric business processes to AI-centric processes."

A pioneering case is the AI transformation of NEC Group's internal management accounting operations. Previously, personnel performed data collection, analysis, budgeting, and budget-actual management sequentially; now, AI continuously analyzes data and proposes strategies and optimization plans. Personnel make final decisions based on AI recommendations and reflect the results in departmental measures. NEC expects this mechanism to reduce management accounting workload by approximately 60% and accelerate the entire process from decision-making to execution. In the procurement domain, a subsidiary of the NEC Group has introduced a service using automated negotiation AI to coordinate delivery dates and quantities of ordered parts with suppliers. Miyaji emphasized: "Not only AI technology is needed, but also business processes premised on AI must be established simultaneously." MX aims to achieve three effects: "winning through response speed," "preventing through foresight," and "strengthening through learning"—that is, rapidly responding to market and supply chain changes, predicting future risks, and accumulating past response experiences as knowledge.