Japanese entrepreneur out to crack the English

An interest in engineering, function and design runs deep in Japanese businessman Mr Tsukasa Takehara.

"When I was a young boy, my hobby was designing radio-controlled model planes," he says. Constructed of lightweight balsa wood and silk to his own blueprints, then carefully painted, the planes each took him half a year to make, then might crash in seconds he admits with polite pride to having demolished more than 50 in his time.

That youthful willingness to innovate and take risks has certainly held him in good stead as the founder, president and chief executive officer of one of Japan's leading independent software development companies, Design Automation Inc, which has its European base in Limerick.

??????a high salary, a job in a high (i.e., large and well-known) company, and tallness entrepreneurs (even tall ones) face particular cultural, financial and business challenges.

Since 1983 Mr Takehara has built a 150-person company which has seen an average 20 per cent growth year on year. Design Automation (DA) marked sales of £13.5 million internationally last year for its Computer Aided Design programs (or CAD, software which allows engineers, architects and illustrators to create highly-detailed and precise technical drawings swiftly by computer).

DA's CAD programs dominate the industrial design market in Japan, and - unusual for an independent software firm in that country - Mr Takehara plans to take DA firmly into the English language market as well.

It's an aggressive approach for a company which began to take shape in Mr Takehara's mind in 1981, when he was recently out of university and working as a systems engineer for Toshiba in Tokyo. A friend of his uncle's gave him one of the earliest personal computers, a Fujitsu FM8.

"I discovered it was very easy to make graphics to run on the computer," he says. His uncle asked him to try making some computer drawings of electronic circuits, and after six months, he designed a CAD system for the PC without ever having seen a CAD program run.

At the time, such programs were only designed for large computers, because creating drawings requires large amounts of memory. Like many early computer programmers who unknowingly took on daunting tasks, Mr Takehara says he would never even have attempted the feat if he had known more about CAD and understood how complicated the programs are. Once finished, though, "I hoped to make my company with that CAD system," says Mr Takehara.

Soon after, he showed the program to a CAD systems manager at Japanese computer manufacturer NEC, which had just released a more powerful, 16-bit computer and was looking for software to help sell it.

"I demonstrated my software to him and he was very surprised to see my CAD system on a small computer," he recalls. NEC gave the young company visibility at exhibitions and in its software catalogue, and DA also benefited from NEC's own rapid growth in the Japanese and Asian markets.

Design Automation also found it didn't compete directly with US rival AutoCAD, the giant in the international market. DA's business has always focused on mechanical design (70 per cent), with the remaining 30 per cent comprising architectural and civil design. AutoCAD's focus is architectural design.

But moving into the English language market is a huge challenge for a Japanese company, primarily because of language differences. Small companies typically cannot afford to hire the employees to create English versions of their products.

Unusually, 15 per cent of DA's employees are foreign, including its research and development group in Limerick, who were integral to DA's current strategy to crack the English market.

Because of AutoCAD's lock on that market, DA is taking a two-pronged approach. It would like to push its CAD products more aggressively in Europe and North America, but Mr Takehara acknowledges that the CAD market is now mature and market share will not shift quickly.

So DA is focusing on its new product, in an entirely new area - document management systems (DMS) - which was largely designed by the Limerick group. The huge increases in computing power and accompanying drop in price for memory, storage and scanners means that DMS, mostly still confined to high-end users like governments, banks and universities, is now available to small to medium enterprises as well.

DMS programs allow documents of many types, from many software applications - text, sound, drawings, spreadsheets, CAD files - to be either held or scanned into a computer, where they can be collectively stored, searched and managed.

Traditional DMS programs are complex, require special programmers to customise and maintain, and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds (although even at those prices, the market is growing at 30 per cent annually). The DA VDM (or Virtual Document Manager) is more democratic, costing in the region of £3,500 for a small network. It runs on Windows 95 or NT and any computer with a Pentium processor.

All the files can be viewed as tiny thumbnails, which can be examined in large groups. A range of document types can all be displayed at once. Mr Takehara feels he has a product which will suit the predicted future of Internet-based business communications, where such multimedia files will be routinely exchanged.

The product is already in use in Japan by customers like Honda's engine design group. Before, Honda engineers had to dig through five large folders of documents, drawings, notes and other paper-based items. The folders are now gone and items can be quickly found and retrieved by computer.

Such streamlining may demand a new mindset from the small to medium-sized office. VDM and products like it offer perhaps the most likely chance for a far more paper-free environment, if not the entirely paperless office DA promotes. Launched into the English language market in Dublin on Wednesday, DA's VDM is certainly a bold step for an entrepreneurial Japanese company.

Here to supervise the launch, Mr Takehara says he is too busy these days running Design Automation to fly model airplanes, and prefers to spend his free time with two young daughters at home in the ancient city of Kyoto, DA's headquarters.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie