Business relationship between a firm and its main bank can be influenced by the physical distance between headquarter and account branch of the main bank. If the distance is longer, it will take more time for bank staff to travel to obtain soft credit information or provide professional support to corporate customers. In this paper, the distance was calculated by geographic information systems. It was found that a firm is more likely to switch its main bank if the distance between headquarter and account branch of its main bank is longer, especially if the main bank is a regional bank. The distance may represent business relationship between a firm and its main bank. It was also found that firms which switched to a regional bank were in weaker financial position among firms which switched their main bank. Regional banks may have difficulties in monitoring their branches.

In the recent manufacturing industry, it is required to respond to rapid demand changes in the situation of tight cost competition with the market globalization and diversification of consumer needs. The demand change point (DCP) analysis with the accumulation graph is easy to perform in actual demand and supply operations, but there is a problem that the analysis takes much time because the graphs must be checked one by one. The objective of this paper is to formulate an algorithm for automatic extraction of DCP based on the accumulation graph analysis.

An algorithm that consists of two processes is formulated; possible points of DCP are extracted, then the points that exist in short term are screened with the change type (increase or decrease). The computerized analysis system is also developed.

By using actual shipping data of a major food company, about 89% of the extraction results are considered proper and we deemed the availability of the algorithm is verified.

In the late 1990s, many Japanese companies have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and replaced their legacy and traditional enterprise information systems with this new package-based system. Those implemented systems need various kinds of maintenance in order to keep fitting to the new business process and/or environmental change in the operational phase. From a practical viewpoint, this study will clarify the maintenance activities on the ERP system based on three case studies of Japanese companies. In this study, we classify the maintenance tasks into six maintenance categories and investigate the frequency of maintenance on each maintenance category. This study concludes that the same maintenance task will not always remain critical in the whole operational phase, and there are strong correlations between each maintenance category, however, those correlations are changing as time passes.

An e-Marketplace (eMP, for short) is a service that provides a mechanism to enable transactions between many sellers and buyers. In Japan, once many e-MPs had started, but only a few of them are surviving. Therefore, the question is: “What is the key enabler for eMPs?” This paper proposes a framework for the description of eMPs that can be used to analyze their business plans and services. The framework is called SSM-IA. And then, the framework is applied to an existing eMP of B2B food industry, FOODS Info Mart. The product of SSM-IA is a description that consists of rich pictures, relevant systems, root definitions, conceptual models, service mapping, and service-architectures. Based on the description of FOODS Info Mart, we point out the three factors: (a) The whole service of the eMP is a comprehensive set of routine works of the user-firms of the eMP; (b) The user-firms could have changed their business processes successfully by incorporating the eMP’s services; (c) The eMP not only executes the services but also involves regular activities to monitor and control them.