In recent years, the risk of supply chain disruption has increased as the result of frequently occurring natural disasters, market diversification and the globalization of competition. Therefore, it is essential to develop some methods for supply chain risk management (SCRM). Especially, it is widely known that the supply chains of the Japanese automotive industry were severely damaged at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The purpose of this paper is to perform an empirical analysis based on a survey of the current status and challenges of SCRM in the Japanese automotive industry. The analysis consisted of conducting a survey with 47 manufacturing plants in the Japanese automotive industry, which was carried out from February to June 2014. The data are divided into three categories: vulnerability of supply chain, efforts toward reducing the supply chain risk, and probability and impact of the risk. In order to verify the factors potentially involved in the data obtained, we applied factor analysis with Promax rotation. According to the results of the factor analysis, five factors whose eigenvalues are more than one were extracted. In order to examine the relationship among the factors extracted, the correlation coefficients were calculated. The results show that there are weak relations between geopolitical risk and technological risk, and information risk and disruption risk. In addition, comparative analyses from the viewpoint of the position along the supply chain were carried out, which clarified that there are some differences in the supply chain risk in terms of the raw materials manufacturers, intermediate goods and semi-finished products manufacturers, and the finished products manufacturers.

In this paper, the author formulates a multiobjective simple recourse programming problem in which equality constraints with fuzzy random variables are involved. In the proposed method, equality constraints with fuzzy random variables are defined applying a possiblity measure. For a given permissible level γ specified by the decision maker, a γ-Pareto optimality concept is introduced. An interactive decision making method is proposed to obtain a satisfactory solution from among the γ-Pareto optimal solution set. The proposed method is applied to a farm planning problem in the Philippines, in which it is assumed that the amount of water supplied during the dry season is represented as a fuzzy random variable.

In this study, re-establishment of allocation of tasks is introduced to a Japanese cuisine restaurant to reduce labor hour at restaurant kitchen. Conventionally, Japanese cuisine chefs operate a cooking position for each; therefore, labor input toward demand fluctuation is not flexible.

To resolve the problem, cooking positions are reduced by rearrangement of cooking operation based on a behavior analysis during off-peak hours (easy to make plan), and mini kitchen, which is similar to cell production, is introduced to cook all kinds of order by a cooking staff while total of free order is low for reduction of man hour, and efficacy is checked at an actual restaurant kitchen. Results show that, 1) it is possible to reduce man hour before hours by re-establishment of allocation of tasks, and during dinner time by utilizing mini kitchen, 2) it is possible to improve labor productivity because the method enhances flexibility of labor input 3) mini kitchen requires high skill kitchen staff to operates it, therefore, it is not easy to introduce the method to fast food and family restaurant because of dependency to part time workers.

Negotiation procedures between a supplier and a retailer in a supply chain model including buyback contract have been studied in recent years. The negotiation procedures in the above studies have consisted of three successive steps: (i) show the necessity that the conclusion of the contract based on a set of contract parameters brings respective incentives to both of the supplier and retailer, (ii) present a mutual relationship between contract parameters of guaranteeing simultaneously optimalities of both of the supplier and retailer, and (iii) determine a unique combination of contract parameters using the Nash bargaining theory. Through successive steps (i)-(iii), some sets of contract parameters have been screened step by step, and eventually, an optimal set of contract parameters has been uniquely decided in step (iii) as a bargaining solution. However, the mathematical significance of respective conditions derived in steps (i) and (ii) for the bargaining solution of step (iii) has not been fully explained. Therefore, we reconsider respective roles of steps (i) and (ii) in the negotiation procedure based on a supply chain model including buyback contract. Then, we confirm the usefulness of the negotiation procedure consisting of three successive steps in the preceding studies.