The diagnosis is the most important element of medical data. This study focused on diagnoses collected in the Diagnosis Procedure Combination/Per-Diem Payment System and designed a method to assess their quality. Quality was defined based on the guidelines of ISO 9000:2015. The level-of-detail of diagnoses was chosen as their characteristic, and the uniformity of level-of-detail of diagnoses among hospitals was considered as a scale of data quality. Specifically, level-of-detail was measured based on the disease classification scheme used, and a target value for level-of-detail was set to assess the quality of diagnoses. This study focused on diagnoses of primary malignant tumors. Their level-of-detail value was the sum of measurements of the following four classification axes: laterality, initial site, pathological diagnosis, and staging. Analyses using data from three general hospitals revealed that one hospital reported diagnoses with a level-of-detail below the target value. Further, non-uniformity among hospitals was indicated. The three hospitals utilized the same process for reporting diagnoses. Specifically, physicians wrote diagnoses on the medical records and administrative staff transcribed them to the medical bills. It was found that the work analysis performed by physicians and administrative staff in that process is important for improving the quality of diagnoses. The present findings suggest the possibility of developing a new hospital evaluation index.

With the recent diversification of product preferences and increasing competition among companies, uncertainty of product demand is increasing. Product market life becomes shorter and precise prediction of selling price, sales volume and market life of products is becoming difficult. As an analysis on investment for product manufacturing, it is insufficient to only calculate the profit / loss under their expected values. There is a need for a method to quantitatively evaluate the risk of investment proposals.

Within such a social background, this paper considers a method for evaluating the profitability and safety of manufacturing investment alternatives under the assumption that product selling price, sales volume and market life are uncertain. In the research, the concept of safety is first defined as the change in the rate of uncertain factors until the profit becomes zero. Next, the paper proposes a method for visualizing the profitability and safety of investment alternatives. In the method proposed, manufacturing investment alternatives are represented as triangles in the X-Y plane indicating the initial investment amount, annual fixed cost and unit variable cost.

This method makes it possible to observe superiority or inferiority of the investment alternatives from the viewpoint of profitability and safety against uncertain change of product selling price, sales volume and market life. In addition, the proposed method by using the X-Y plane can help to examine new investment alternatives with improved profit and safety. For example, it can consider improved alternatives which raise safety against shortening market life while maintaining the target profit by reducing the initial investment amount and increasing the unit variable cost.

In recent years, there is a need to reduce the preparation period for production, and setting up an optimal assembly sequence has become more important at assembly plants. Actually, however, some feasible sequences are decided by experienced engineers, who utilize their skills and experiences in the decision-making process in many cases. This paper focuses on intermediate products assembled in assembling processes, and firstly devises a method to generate these intermediate products, using the Position Relations Matrix proposed in previous research. This paper then proposes an intermediate products generation method including three types of constraints (intermediate product constraint, consecution constraint, and precedence constraint) for a product consisting of many parts. The proposed method is finally applied to two products with 22 parts and 55 parts, respectively, and the effectiveness is verified.

In logistics warehouse work, stock placement that enables high productivity when shipping is required. In this research, we develop technology to recommend storage location. At the warehouse site, there is a problem that products to be stored are not known until just before being inventoried and placed in the warehouse because they are stowed on pallets in the order of arrival after inspection and distribution processes have finished. Therefore, we developed a storage location recommendation technology that sequentially issues storage location recommendations for invididual pallets holding the items to be stored. In the technology, items that are stored for a short period of time and shipped frequently are evaluated using past inventory data and shipping records, and preferentially recommended to be stored in an area where shipping work efficiency is high, based on a relative comparison of shipping frequency and the stock storage period between the storing pallet and the stock pallets in reserve area. As a result, even in situations where products targeted for storage are not known until just before storage, it is possible to locate the stock that enables product shipment to be highly productive. A demonstration experiment was carried out at a cosmetics warehouse and the effect of reducing shipment man-hours by about 3.8% was confirmed.