Supply chain for many products spreads across the countries and regions due to globalization of economic activities. Companies should manage the long and widespread global supply chain. They are required to integrate their production and sales activities across the world. Through the case study of global supply chain of Toyota, this paper shows how Toyota coordinates production and sales in Japan, USA, Europe and China. This paper points out that component sourcing and market characteristics are the key issues in global supply chain management of Toyota.

Buying behavior within limited time tend to take a different action from the usual buying behavior. This is because consumers feel pressure under limited time. This is defined as “time pressure.” Research on time pressure is continuing to this day. This paper attempts to present a critique and commentary on Dhar and Nowlis (1999), which clarifies the effects that time pressure and the degree of conflict among products have on the consumer choice deferral and discusses whether their experiments were really able to measure the “decision of postponement” of the consumer.

The CES in Las Vegas is one of the most influential events in the consumer technology. In the CES 2016 new technology areas, like IoT, AI, VR, Drone, Autonomous driving were widely demonstrated, and a new trend of the rising human-computer cooperation got attention. After reviewing those changes, challenges for Japanese industry are verified.