Works Design Pro LLC
Enterprise Consultancy for Digital Transformation
Digital Twins. Real Impact.
Enterprise Consultancy for Digital Transformation
Digital Twins. Real Impact.
Providing enterprise consultancy by introducing Digital Transformation strategies, with expertise in IoT, Digital Twins, and Industry 4.0/5.0 innovations.
Hiroshi Yamamoto is a technology strategist and builder whose work sits at the intersection of cyber‑physical systems (CPS), digital twins, and enterprise‑scale digital transformation. Over the past two decades he has partnered with global manufacturers, infrastructure operators, and technology vendors to translate board‑level ambition into resilient operating systems—blending cloud‑native software, secure industrial connectivity, AI/ML, and human‑centered change management. Today he leads Works Design Pro LLC, an enterprise consultancy focused on practical, metrics‑driven transformation for Industry 4.0/5.0, while continuing to contribute to the broader ecosystem through standards‑oriented collaboration and public speaking.
Yamamoto’s transformation perspective is rooted in real operations. He has guided organizations through the hard problems that decide whether a program scales: system‑of‑systems architecture, closed‑loop value delivery, and the choreography of people, process, and platforms. His approach begins with a CPS blueprint—explicitly connecting IoT (sensing and actuation), IoS (service orchestration), and IoP (human‑in‑the‑loop decision making)—so that telemetry, business context, and domain knowledge are fused into a continuously improving control loop. From that foundation, he designs asset‑centric data products (digital twins of equipment, lines, and facilities), maps them to business outcomes (OEE, scrap reduction, energy intensity, uptime, safety), and then implements a progressive rollout plan that survives the realities of brownfield estates and multi‑vendor fleets.
Earlier in his career, Yamamoto served as a Distinguished Engineer and Global Electronics Industry CTO, where he advised multinational manufacturers on design‑to‑field lifecycle integration and the non‑functional requirements that make or break industrial software—security, latency, observability, and maintainability across global plants. He later joined Toshiba in 2018 as Corporate Digitization CTO, leading teams building the CPS infrastructure behind initiatives such as SPINEX™ and the Meister Cloud series. In that role he helped codify a reference model for connecting and optimizing on‑site assets, exposing domain expertise as reusable digital capabilities, and enabling subscription‑based services for factories and equipment OEMs. These experiences continue to inform his consulting playbooks: emphasize production‑grade patterns; treat digital twins as living, governed data products; and anchor every milestone to measured business impact.
Across dozens of programs, Yamamoto has observed a consistent pattern: successful transformations establish closed‑loop governance early. That means aligning strategy (vision and portfolio choices) with architecture (target reference models and integration contracts), with delivery (incremental releases tied to plant KPIs), and with operations (SRE‑like practices for industrial systems). He frames this as moving from isolated pilots to a platform that compounds—where every new use case strengthens the core (shared data models, identity, telemetry pipelines, edge runtime, and safety posture). For clients, the practical outcomes include faster ramp of new products, predictive maintenance with verified ROI, energy‑aware scheduling, and quality diagnostics that cut defects while preserving throughput.
Security and sustainability are first‑class design constraints in his work. On the security side, Yamamoto has consistently highlighted the realities of industrial attack surfaces: legacy protocols, long‑lived devices, and the tension between determinism and encryption at the edge. His guidance focuses on defense‑in‑depth, segmented networks, certificate‑managed device identity, and a zero‑trust posture that still respects real‑time operations. On sustainability, he treats digital twins as decision engines for material and energy efficiency—closing the loop between production plans, actual consumption, and continuous optimization. The result is not just greener operations, but resilient cost structures that absorb volatility in energy pricing and supply chains.
Yamamoto is an active community contributor. He has participated in IEEE World Forum on IoT programs and industry panels, speaking about the design challenges unique to physical products and the organizational patterns required for success at scale. He also engages with the Digital Twin Consortium and related ecosystems to promote interoperability, capability frameworks, and practical success stories. His public work emphasizes the importance of open interfaces, vendor‑neutral data models, and the ability to port analytics and AI across assets, sites, and suppliers without re‑engineering every integration.
At Works Design Pro, Yamamoto and his collaborators focus on three engagement archetypes:
Technically, Yamamoto’s toolset spans cloud services (data lakes, stream processing, real‑time analytics), AI/ML for anomaly detection and optimization, and edge‑to‑cloud control patterns. He is comfortable in both executive and engineering forums: reviewing architecture, defining reliability budgets, and shaping operating models (product‑based funding, platform teams, site enablement). He pays particular attention to governed data products—versioned schemas, lineage, and SLAs for twin freshness—so that analytics and agents trust the data they act upon. He also advocates for human‑in‑the‑loop design: operators and engineers are not just end users; they are co‑designers whose tacit knowledge must be captured and amplified.
Yamamoto frequently advises on standards and interoperability. In heterogeneous factories, the winning pattern is a layered, contract‑driven architecture: standardized equipment interfaces; a canonical semantic layer linking assets to processes; policy‑driven access control; and a twin registry exposing queryable state and events. This allows AI agents and workflows to act safely—issuing recommendations, simulating scenarios, and when appropriate closing the loop with supervised actuation. He emphasizes that autonomy is a gradient, not a binary; mature programs progress from monitoring, to advisory, to supervised control, to bounded autonomy with provable safety.
Clients value Yamamoto’s communication style: concise, candid, and anchored in measurable outcomes. He is known for converting complex roadmaps into simple, visual scorecards—what will be built, where it will run, how it will be secured, and which KPIs will move. He pairs this clarity with hands‑on pragmatism: pilot quickly with representative assets; instrument aggressively; build the minimum viable platform that multiple teams can share; and never ship a model without a plan for drift, retraining, and operator feedback.
Outside of client work, Yamamoto contributes to the broader conversation on industrial innovation—writing, mentoring, and convening cross‑functional workshops that bring together OT, IT, product, and finance leaders. His long‑term thesis is simple: the best manufacturers will behave like software companies, and the best software companies will respect the physics of factories and infrastructure. Digital twins and CPS are the bridge. With a disciplined architecture and a culture of continuous improvement, every factory and fleet can become a compounding engine of efficiency, quality, and service innovation.
Representative focus areas: CPS reference architectures; digital twin product management; industrial connectivity and edge runtimes; reliability & SRE for OT systems; closed‑loop quality; energy optimization; safety & compliance; identity and zero‑trust for industrial estates; AI agent integration with supervision; platform operating models; and outcome‑based service design.
Selected public references: interviews and articles on CPS leadership and SPINEX/Meister Cloud; IEEE WF‑IoT industry panels on IoT design challenges; and consortium contributions to digital‑twin standards and success stories. These illustrate the through‑line of Yamamoto’s work: connecting physical operations with cyber intelligence to create durable, scalable value.
Building on the existing profile, the steel inspection transformation emphasizes how AI augments people on the floor and in labs—making expert work faster, more consistent, and easier to audit, while preserving human authority:
Read more in the IIC Journal of Innovation paper: Digital Transformation in Steel Inspection.
For engagements, speaking, or press inquiries, please email or connect on LinkedIn: