Tokyo--Toshiba Corporation and Toshiba Medical Systems Co., Ltd. today announced that they have merged their respective technical service divisions for medical equipment in a Technical Assistance Center (TAC) that started to provide advanced service and support to hospitals and medical facilities throughout Japan in November.

The medical community increasingly relies on advanced medical diagnostics imaging equipment for, non-invasive diagnosis and investigation of patients. To be completely effective, that equipment, including MRI, X-ray CT, X-ray Angio system and Ultrasound systems, must perform at peak reliability. TAC assures that it does with a range of advanced support services. Chief amongst these is "InnerVision^TM," a remote maintenance system that connects to installed systems via a phone line and monitors the system operation, diagnostic functions and image quality.

TAC's overall operations, including call center services, will be fully supported by the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system Toshiba introduced in October 2001. Its capabilities include synchronization with a reorganized logisitics management system that minimizes response times to user demands through early delivery of service parts. The CRM system will also assure that essential customer information is shared by Toshiba's Medical Systems Co.'s design, manufacturing, sales and service divisions, in order to reinforce its capabilities in future product development and business proposals.

Toshiba already deploys Japan's most extensive service network for medical diagnostics imaging equipment. Operating on the basis of close-to-local-society, approximately 1,000 service-staff operate from 82 service centers. TAC will enhance management of this network and reinforce Toshiba's position in the medical equipment industry.

On the international level, TAC is positioned as Toshiba's central service technology center for medical diagnostics imaging equipment. In this capacity, it will support and cooperate with Toshiba's other medical equipment service centers in the U.S., Holland, Singapore and Brazil. This service network currently undertakes service and support activities in 120 countries.

Enhancing Medical Equipment Service Support in Japan

• Newly deployed CRM to reinforces TAC's capabilities and improves efficiency of service support.
  

  *	Highly efficient business processes will allow TAC to respond quickly to customer requests and cut the time taken to provide solutions to problems.
  *	"InnerVisionTM" will allow Toshiba to monitor individual systems and equipment populations, allowing it to build a database on overall performance, monitor any failures and failure rates. This will allow it to enhance primary support by local service centers and to improve product reliability and performance.

• Reorganization of supplying service parts
  

  *	Toshiba's system of for service parts supply is now globalized. The Service Parts Center at Nasu Operations is the hub of a standardized global supply system.
  *	Logistics are handled by Toshiba Logistics Corporation, a move that supports greater overall efficiency.