Omron Tateisi, best known for its point of sale terminals outside Japan, has decided to strengthen its office automation equipment division, to bring its sales up to 10% of its total revenue within a year or two, and the first step will be to develop information systems that apply its experience in the factory automation field: the first product to be developed is a system that will collect data from electronic cash registers and terminal and dump it directly into a mainframe; the company also plans to develop a local network system for the exchange of data and images, for small and medium-sized retailers; Omron also plans to start selling Sigma workstations more aggressively, in particular offering a computer-aided design system based on the Sigma workstation, which it hopes will bring it in $15m of business altogether; it has already sold around 500 workstations to users such as Tohoku University and the Tokyo Industry University; currently a mere 3% of Omron $2,121m annual sales comes from the office automation market – 65% is currently control components, 23% is point-of-sale kit.
