Factors in design and application of an ergonomic checklist for ergonomic appraisal of industrial jobs and workplaces are discussed. The types of such checklists are diversified according to differences in areas covered, patterns of setting questions and perspectives underlying the checking procedures. Results of field surveys in which newly desigined checklists were applied to air traffic controllers' consoles, agricultural machines and foundry workshops show that a corrective checklist would be more useful than an analytical one and that check results are dependent upon the checkers' knowledge and check strategies. A good checklist should thus be a flexible list that helps the user extract covert problems of the work system in question.

View full abstract

Scientific management of sales plan is one of the approaches to solve the strategic problem of business. In this paper, the effects of usng this approach and applying the computer oriented methods are discussed. In the design of sales planning, which consists of the functional method and the exponential one, the market analysis is applied to the action with respect to the accuracy, the rapidity, the cost and so on. Especially, the process of establishing the sales plan is considered. And then, apart from the traditional management, the more scientific determination of the marketing index and the sales quota based on the statistical method is analyzed.

View full abstract

Order-selection problems are usually modeled through 0-1 programming methods to find an optimal package of orders from among a large number of candidates. However, in many real world order-selection problems, the decision to accepto or reject an arriving order should be made promptly upon its arrival without waiting for the arrival of other orders over a long-term time horizon. It is known that the rate of retum method in single-dimensional problems and the effective gradient method in multi-dimensional problems can be used to solve these types of real world problems. These methods determine acceptance or rejection of an order of comparing its rate of return or effective gradient with a given specified criterion. Here, the problem is how to establish the criterion. This paper presents a simple and easy method for establishing an acceptance/rejection criterion using back-log inventory in long-term order-selection problems. The method is applicable to such complex problems in which the distribution of profitability of arriving candidate orders changes over a specified time horizon.

View full abstract

The distribution of cumulative sums in cu-sum control charts is derived. Taking this variation into account, some new statistical characteristics are introduced. As a result, it is found that cu-sum charts can indicate a process change more quickly than is thought as ARL values, Nomograms to facilitate practical applications are presented.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the job-content of Japanese industrial engineers in terms of personal attributes. From the research made on 5610 industrial engineers, some tentative conclusions may be drawn as follows : (1) The funciton of industrial engineers is more specialized in larger companies. The job of industrial engineers at a lower level of management is limited to a narrower field related to the traditional IE. The scope of industrial engineers' job at a higher level is broader and its content is related to the modern IE. (2) In smaller companies, the function of industrial engineers is not so specialized as in larger companies.

View full abstract

A periodic inspection and replacement policy, considering both the early detection and prevention of equipment failures, is proposed in this paper. The optimization procedure and the property of the optimal solution under the criterion which minimizes the expected cost per unit good time are presented through two theorems and a property respectively. The numerical analysis is also made. The results show that this policy has the trade-off relation between the inspection and the preventive replacement and that the higher the degree of deterioration in the failure mode becomes, the greater the weight of the replacement increases.

View full abstract

An established management system is dependent upon its social and economic environment. This paper analyses factors of the social and economic environment, in which the Taylor System is formed, including the increase in population, immigration, steel industry, labor movement, concentration of enterprises and advancement of industrial technology, and makes clear the interactions of these factors and studies the system based on the theory of Maximum-Profit Equilibrium. It proposes a method for understanding the system in other environments and an approach for establishing future management systems.

View full abstract

Transportation of goods by trucks plays an important role in the physical distribution system of most business enterprises. The selection and planning of the most suitable kind of trucks for a given commodity, business activity and route is one of the essential elements in order to reduce the transportation cost. Present paper considers a method of evaluating economy of employing trucks from a macroscopic point of view. The study of establishing an approximation formula for estimating the driving distance relative to the size of trucks was presented in the previous reports by the authors. With the application of the above results, a method of evaluating the total freight costs was first established. Then, the profitability of trucks by the type of road, viz. simplified network and the real world network, was examined and relative advantages between them under various combination of values of factors being considered were investigated. In order to check the validity of the method, an example was taken from a soft-drink manufacture. The result, which was given in a graphical presentation indicated how the economical regions for each type of truck changed under various road conditions.

View full abstract