This study proposes a team management system which organizes feasible teams within an organization. This system takes both the internal and external aspects of project members into account, using competency and the Enneagram. A feasible team is a collection of members with enough ability for project achievement. It is measured through competency, focusing on the external aspects of team members. Team competency is defined to evaluate the ability of the whole team. It is classified into an additive type, a selective type, and a balanced type. The additive type is a grand total of the competency evaluation level of the team members. When a particular ability is required to be prominent for the success of a project, the project manager uses the selective type to select project members. When the project manager wants to emphasize the balance of members, he/she uses the balanced type. After a feasible team is organized through competency evaluation, the Enneagram is used for identifying one through nine types of person. This system consists of a personal data evaluation system and a team formation system. The former does competency evaluation and Enneagram analysis. The later performs omni-directional evaluation of competency and Enneagram analysis by a team enneagram congeniality (TEC) value. It represents the level of affinity among the members within a team. The system is evaluated in terms of operability and performance. A competency portfolio is made for various combinations of teams with different competency distributions. The relationship between competency evaluation level and TEC value is shown as the Enneagram portfolio. The calculation time for feasible and optimal teams to be obtained is compared. A feasible team is obtained faster and calculation time remains unchanged even if the item numbers of competency increases.

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Recently, interest in logistics and supply chain management (SCM) has grown explosively through exposure to fierce competition and changing circumstances. One of the main themes in SCM is integration along the supply chain in order to improve performance. This paper intends to investigate the impact of SCM competencies on managerial performance such as ROA and cash flow. For analyzing SCM competencies, a SCM Logistics Scorecard (LSC) has been utilized as a self-evaluation tool for participated manufacturing companies in Japan. From the LSC database, three factors, namely, SCM organizational ability, responsiveness and IT utilization ability, were extracted as SCM competencies. Using the corresponding companies' financial bottom line indices, high correlations between these indices and SCM competencies were observed. At the same time, market uncertainty was taken up and a framework was developed to investigate its moderating effect on SCM competencies and financial bottom lines. From the results, uncertainty could be considered as a requirement for efficient SCM. In order to correspond to this uncertainty, the importance of SCM organizational ability was confirmed. On the other hand, it has been verified that IT is necessary, but not sufficient, to lead to enhanced managerial performance.

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Taguchi has presented the concept of quality loss as an evaluation measure of the quality of items based on variable properties. Recently, Takemoto and Arizono, and Morita et al. have proposed variable sampling inspection with screening for the purpose of assuring the upper limit of maximum expected surplus loss after inspection. In this inspection scheme, it is assumed that the product lot consists of only items manufactured through a single production line and the lot quality characteristics follow a normal distribution. In previous literature regarding inspection schemes, it has been commonly assumed that lot quality characteristics obey the single normal distribution under the assumption that all the items are manufactured under the same conditions. On the other hand, the production line should be designed in order that the workload of respective processes becomes uniform on the basis of the concept of line balancing. Therefore, the bottleneck process for the workload is generally composed of more than one parallel workshop. The lot quality characteristics from such a production line with the process consisting of some parallel workshops might not strictly follow single normal distribution. Therefore, in this article, we expand an applicable scope of the above-mentioned variable sampling inspection with screening. Specifically, we consider variable sampling inspection with screening for the purpose of assuring the upper limit of maximum expected surplus quality loss in the production lots when the lot quality follows mixed normal distribution consisting of two normal distributions, as a basic study into quality assurance for mixed normal distributions. Then, the applicability and effectiveness of the sampling inspection are verified.

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Recent literature has revealed that CS (customer satisfaction) is not only driven by corporate efforts at the micro level, but also by economic processes at the macro level. Using time-series data from three durable goods industries, pioneer work in this field discovered that CS is negatively influenced by the stock index, a measure of economic expectations. Extending their research and adding new data measured in 2004 and 2007, analyses were conducted under the following two hypotheses: 1) CS is influenced negatively by economic expectations and positively by economic growth, and 2) economic expectations should have a particularly strong influence on CS with peripheral product functions, compared to CS with core product functions. These hypotheses were supported, but the positive impact of economic growth on CS was not significant in all analyses. Managers and researchers should design methods to correct longitudinal CS values from economic influences, so that they better reflect the customer-oriented performance of firms.

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Many cerebral palsy patients are employed in social welfare companies. They are offered data entry jobs or similar jobs in which they operate computers that run using graphical user interface (GUI) software. Cerebral palsy patients will show their capabilities at work, if they are offered a GUI environment that fits the characteristics of their upper limbs. Positioning operation can be effectively carried out by adjusting the D/C ratio, which is calculated by dividing the movement distance of a pointer by that of an input device. In this study, the speed wave pattern of the pointer on the GUI screen is classified into the movement aspect and the positioning aspect, and the time taken for each movement is calculated. Furthermore, the influence of the D/C ratio on the movement time is discussed in order to determine how the D/C ratio minimizes the movement time. The relation between D/C ratio and the movement time was found to be linear. Further, the relation between the D/C ratio and the positioning time was found to be linear or second-order curvilinear, depending on the target distance and target size.

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Corporate management with a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) focus is now drawing attention. The stakeholders of corporations are closely watching how corporations are managed from CSR perspectives oriented towards corporate sustainability, and corporations themselves are beginning to build CSR structures in pursuit of enhanced corporate value. Corporations with highly motivated employees are more likely to improve their CSR performance, while the employees at corporations with high CSR standards are more likely to be CSR-conscious and to have strong work motivation. Some corporations are trying to activate this positive spiral in order to contribute socially through their primary business and fulfill their CSR. According to Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory, evaluations of aggressive criteria (the corporation's active measures and strategies) and defensive criteria (the corporation's internal control and risk management systems) undertaken during CSR evaluations produce different results, depending on whether the evaluator is a "motivator" seeker or a "hygienic factor" seeker. Heeding this tendency, we present a new model to express the relation between the work motivation of employees and the corporation's CSR evaluation results in a brief and easy-to-understand manner.

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