TDK’s industrial sensing portfolio spanned three business units with three product languages. We unified them into SensEI — one dashboard where plant managers can watch every asset at a glance, in English or Japanese, across the full TDK stack.
TDK is one of the world’s largest industrial sensing companies, but its three sensing business units had grown separately. Each shipped its own dashboard, its own alerting language, its own notion of what “healthy” looked like. A plant manager running a factory with motors from one unit, compressors from a second and environmental sensors from a third was reading three different stories about the same floor.
For TDK’s next-generation Edge AI push, that fragmentation was the blocker. The business needed a single platform — branded, consistent, bilingual — that let operators across Japan, the US and Europe see the whole facility in one glance, and let TDK’s sales teams tell one story at trade shows.
We started with the operators, not the sensors. Over several weeks of ride-alongs with plant teams at TDK partner facilities, we mapped how people actually scan a dashboard under pressure: what they look at first, what they ignore, when they switch to Japanese, when they switch to English.
That shaped three design decisions that run through the whole product:
SensEI is TDK’s unified operator dashboard for industrial asset monitoring. It launched into the TDK channel ecosystem and the sales team now demos one product at CES, Hannover Messe and SEMICON instead of three.
The platform earned a CES Innovation Award in the Smart Cities & Industrial IoT category — a public signal from the industry’s most-watched judging panel that the unified approach was the right one.
Beyond the award, the real measure is quieter: TDK’s three sensing business units now ship product that looks like it came from one company. New sensors slot into SensEI the week they’re ready, not the quarter after a dashboard refactor. The design system we built is still in production.