"The Burden of Transport Has Eased, and We Gained a Quieter Workspace": How Type B Employment Support Facility You& Deployed Kachaka

Kachaka isn’t just for the home. It performs equally well in commercial settings such as offices, hospitals, and work facilities. For this article, we spoke with You&, a Type B continuous employment support facility in Osaka, to learn how they put Kachaka to work.

About You&

You& is a Type B continuous employment support facility that supports people who find regular employment difficult due to physical, intellectual, or mental disabilities. With staff assistance, members carry out work without needing to sign an employment contract, allowing them to engage in straightforward job training. The work centers on outsourced piecework tasks, including bagging, labeling, inspection, and more.

Official website: https://youand-osaka.com/

What prompted you to bring in Kachaka?

Every task our members work on is prepared in advance and handed out by You& staff. In the past, staff had to carry the prepared piecework to each member’s desk and then collect every finished item one by one. As the number of members grew, the burden of this transport work kept mounting.

On top of the work itself, staff also delivered lunch boxes during the midday break. Just as we were wondering how to make all this carrying more efficient, we came across Kachaka and decided to buy one.

Tell us how you use Kachaka and what changed after deployment.

After deploying Kachaka, all of our transport work is now handled by the robot.

Here’s how it works in practice: we set up a staff base, and Kachaka carries the piecework to be processed from that base to each member’s desk, where members take the items off the shelf themselves. When a task is done, members simply call Kachaka, place the finished work on the shelf, and the robot returns it to the staff base. This saved us all the legwork of making trip after trip back and forth.

Setup was simple too. It was done within 15 minutes, and we were able to put it straight into real-world use. Anyone can operate it with ease, which we find incredibly convenient.

What’s more, after deployment foot traffic inside the facility dropped, giving us a quieter workspace and lowering the risk of people bumping into one another.

Staff can now focus on preparing the piecework, and scheduling mistakes have become rarer. Bringing in Kachaka has thoroughly streamlined our entire operation.

We also featured “deploying cutting-edge robotics” on the You& official website, which generated plenty of buzz and proved effective in attracting new members. Kachaka’s charming way of moving around has been a big hit with our members.

(Image from the You& official website.)

“Being able to boost efficiency this much makes it an investment well worth the cost.”