TAISEI CORPORATION was founded in 1873 as Okura Gumi Shokai. Since then, for over 150 years beginning in the early Meiji era, the company has contributed to the development of various infrastructure projects and urban planning that have laid the foundation for the development of Japan today. While establishing its position as a “Super general contractor” and undergoing repeated reorganizations and expansions, the company changed its name to its current one in 1946. Currently, under its head office in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, the company consists of 17 Domestic Branches, 1 Operations Headquarters, 1 Advanced Center of Technology, 41 Domestic Sales Offices, and 7 Overseas Offices. Over 9,500 employees are working in these locations (as of the end of March 2026). For this article, we interviewed Design Dept. within Civil Engineering Div. in the head office.

“As a general contractor, our business is always centered on the ‘construction site’, which has never changed. Design Dept. is a way a support team for assisting the sites to contribute to getting new contracts,” says General Manager Yamamoto, outlining their role.

On the other hand, during the period since we presented the Dept. last time in our article over 30 years ago, the business environment surrounding earthquakes including the seismic design of civil engineering structures has changed significantly as Japan has experienced multiple large-scale earthquake disasters. Furthermore, due to the cycles of renewal and maintenance required for civil engineering structures, there has been a noticeable increase in recent years in projects such as the replacement of road bridge deck slabs and maintenance work on water and sewer infrastructure triggered by the road collapse incident in Yashio City, Saitama Prefecture,” says Mr. Kazuhiko Chino, Head of Design Planning Office, the 1st Civil Engineering Design Section of the Dept.

In particular, the Dept. has traditionally been staffed with many young employees and has historically served as an educational institution where they learn the fundamentals of civil engineering. Employees in the Design Dept. have easy and quick access to cutting-edge knowledge including legislative revisions of earthquake-related laws. They are also able to adapt to the updates of respective guidelines and to rapidly evolving software tools reflecting those updates. Moreover, as Mr. Chino notes, there is a benefit of gaining experience with fundamental design work at a young age before handling field operations.

The first introduction of the products of UC-1 Series into the company dates back to 1983. Since then, multiple departments including the offices within the Design Dept of the Civil Engineering Div. have expanded their use of software products comprising the series depending on the designs of diverse civil engineering structures. They have kept on using the series for many years along with changes in the environments of civil engineering and IT (information technology).

Regarding this, Mr. Yamamoto referred to their stance saying, “As FORUM8 provides a variety of products suited to the times, we utilize the ones that are convenient for us as a user.” He expressed the view that, thanks to their relationship of trust cultivated over the years, when new guidelines are issued, they are able to conduct designing relatively easily as long as they use the program developed by FORUM8 according to the new guideline.

Design Planning Office is part of Design Dept. and is primarily responsible for the design of various civil engineering structures, seismic evaluations and seismic analysis, as well as training for new employees and the planning of such programs.

Mr. Tadashi Nagase, Deputy Manager of the Office who serves as the project leader for seismic evaluations and analysis of civil engineering structures, listed the following FORUM8 products used in Land Design Office and other offices in the Dept.: “Abutment 3D bar arrangement”, “Foundation 3D bar arrangement”, “Retaining wall design 3D bar arrangement”, and “Geo technical improvement 3DCAD”. He further noted that “FRAME Manager” and “RC section calculation”, which are the main tools used in the Design Planning Office, are increasingly being utilized in a wide variety of situations across all offices.

While the company adapts to changes in the environment and the times by developing various new products, its people come and go all the time. Thus, the company passes on the knowledge it has accumulated through its adaptation to these changes to newcomers to the civil engineering industry. In this sense, new employee education is very important. General Manager Yamamoto reflects that FORUM8 programs have been utilized as part of efforts to enhance it.

The new employee training program conducted by the Design Dept. is intended for all employees assigned to civil engineering sections. Led by Design Planning Office, topics essential for civil engineering design such as temporary earth retaining, retaining walls, and box culverts are selected. At the same time, curriculum of the training such as classroom instruction and hands-on exercises and schedule are developed. Training typically begins around May each year after new employees join the company in April.

For hands-on exercises, currently both “FRAME Manager” and “RC section calculation,” the software mentioned at the beginning, are used. With a plenty of track record of being used, these programs are easy to operate even for those who use them for the first time. The results of analysis and calculation are also easy to view on them. All new employees are required to use these software tools to create drawings, prepare calculation reports, and do presentation based on the design conditions within a specified construction period.

For example, "Box Culvert Design Exercise", one of the major topics of the training, is conducted in a mostly similar format every year as a fundamental assignment. Each trainee is given an assignment to design specifications with different parameters such as width, height, groundwater flow, and earth covering.

While the entire training series would take about two months if conducted in depth, it is possible to set the duration flexibly by adjusting condition settings and levels of difficulty according to the needs of the trainees’ departments, such as field operations or design, according to Mr. Chino.

“As the world becomes more complex, software programs themselves are also becoming more complex in response.” Consequently, unless users fully understand the program, it cannot be said that there is no possibility of using it incorrectly. While mentioning the trust placed in FORUM8’s products, General Manager Yamamoto says it is also necessary to build up a system for preventing errors, in checking input data for example.

Regarding “FRAME Manager” and “RC section calculation,” which are also used in the aforementioned new employee training, Mr. Chino highly evaluates them for their ability to calculate cross-sectional forces of box culverts or reinforced concrete (RC) cross-sections.

Additionally, Mr. Tomoki Hiratsuka, who uses both software programs most frequently within Design Planning Office though this is his second year with the company, first used them during the new employee training. Through a few hours of hands-on exercises, he intuitively understood the contents and realized that “just entering the necessary data allows the user to easily output sectional force diagrams and so on, and things that were unclear when calculated by hand become easy to understand when visualized.” However, he notes that in the future it will be more important to thoroughly examine the calculation process and contents rather than simply being satisfied with the easily output results.

In this regard, Mr. Nagase pays attention to the aspect of both software programs that are “user-friendly even for first-time users.” Furthermore, as accountability to clients is required more and more, he noted that these tools are useful also as explanatory tools because they are capable of visually showing the sectional force or displacement that reflect the input conditions. He also mentions the importance of using them not only as convenient tools that provide answers by inputting conditions but also as the ones that provide the user with a chance to think why these results are obtained.

In civil engineering, each type of work has its own distinct culture, and the personnel of each type of work rarely move between each other. However, there are “fundamental principles” common to concrete and geotechnical engineering. General Manager Yamamoto describes the recent structure that DX (digital transformation) and IT are intricately intertwined with these principles.

“I believe that the key to the future of civil engineering will be how to manage the ‘DX and IT = ‘diagonal skewer’ within the conventional two-dimensional framework of ‘type of work = vertical skewer’ and ‘concrete and ground = horizontal skewer.’”

(Written by Takashi Ikuno)