While introductions of SCM in the Japan companies got into full swing after 2000, a lot of SCM divisions have been set up. The aim is to promote SCM, and it is the mission of the division. Efforts related to supply chains tend to be restrained by the conflicts of inter-organizations. Shared understandings and formations of ‘ba’ are necessary to solve those. The focus of this study is a consideration of SCM divisions’ commitments to the deployments of ‘ba’. This study considers the cases of multiple major processed food manufacturers in view of the constituents of ‘ba’ which are led in the reviews of advanced studies. To tell the conclusion, the SCM divisions make competent contributions to the actions within the company, but limited contribution to the actions outside the company. Though retailers strengthening powers by the oligopoly make many suggestions about SCM to the manufacturers, this study arrive at the conclusion that there are some doubts about the readinesses.

This paper proposes a novel approach for developing management information systems (MIS). In recent years formal description techniques have been applied for MIS development in order to give rigorous specification, reduce the re-development cost, and raise reliability of systems. However, some problems are pointed out, such as the hardness of learning specification languages, the difficulty of automated executable code generation, and so forth.

Our group has proposed a formal approach for MIS development, called “Model Theory Approach”. Most existing formal approaches are associated with set-theoretical languages to specify systems. CAST (computer acceptable set theory), the main topic of this paper, is also a set-theoretical model description language for Model Theory Approach. This paper shows that CAST solves some problems which have been pointed out in the literatures of formal description technique, and that it has the sufficient capability of MIS description. Finally, we claim that the acquisition of set-theoretical languages such as CAST is effective for MIS development.

Although evidence has been accumulated in industrialised countries concerning the IT impact on productivity at the macro-level, empirical studies at the micro (i.e., firm) level have just started in Japan. The METI report, “100 Best IT Management Cases”, published in April 2005, contains quantitative data such as sales, recurrent profit and IT spending of 111 progressive SMEs which are usually difficult to access. With regard to the organisational characteristics, a simplified measurement of organisational IQ was devised, since there are only unstructured texts to describe organisational traits of each sample company in the report. The analysis finds that the relationship between IT investments and firm performance is significantly affected by organisational IQ.

Auditing against Generic Management System requirements, like requirements of ISO 9001, is an established means for evaluating organizational capabilities. However, the effectiveness of management system audits is under scrutiny. The authors identified semantic problems in applying generic requirements and difficulties in applying a process approach in auditing as a main cause for less effective auditing. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a semantic audit information management system based on the Web Ontology Language OWL and to propose a new audit methodology for process-oriented auditing using an upper audit domain ontology called AuditOWL. In this paper we analyze semantic problems faced in auditing, we show how we construct the upper audit domain ontology AuditOWL and propose the use of AuditOWL in a semantic audit support system. The proposed system is developed in order to reduce semantic problems and increase audit value by effective knowledge sharing between parties interested in auditing and the audit conclusions. This paper intends to help transform the audit process from a formal compliance check to a value adding knowledge acquisition and sharing process.