JFE Shoji Trade Corporation held a presentation of its business reform activities (commonly known as J-SLIM) on November 10 and 11 and December 19 and 20. This year, as in the previous year and the year before, the conference was held online, and a total of 21 organizations, including 16 organizations selected from each division and 5 domestic and overseas group companies, made presentations. The presentations were viewed by approximately 120 employees of the Group, including the president and executives, who shared their examples of improvement and initiatives with the entire Group.

J-SLIM began in 2008 and is now in its 15th year. The purpose of J-SLIM is to review the way we work outside of conventional thinking and to change the mindset of our employees, leading to a change in our corporate culture. We believe that continuous change, even if it is a small change, will strengthen the company's structure, and we always question our own work and value change and change itself in our activities.

The contents of the presentation will include a review of conventional operations such as photo management and document preparation, improvement of information sharing methods using BOX (cloud storage), management tools for work progress, OCR (optical character recognition technology), RPA (robotic process automation), and other IT-based operational efficiency improvements, as well as the establishment of a system to collaborate with group companies and other offices. The project also included the establishment of a framework for collaboration with group companies and other offices. In addition to the improvement of operational efficiency, this year was also unique in that many presentations were made from the perspective of improving accuracy and preventing errors.

The environment surrounding our company is changing rapidly. In order to respond to these changes, we will continue our activities to review our conventional working methods, ways of thinking, and approaches, and to create a new system with higher productivity.