Traditional planning in the business environment is used to allocate and coordinate resources mainly on basis of company-internal data. Thereby, a general weakness is that macroeconomic changes, due to business cycles, are not taken into consideration and the chance to take advantage of the associated effects on the revenues of an individual enterprise is missed. Including a macroeconomic trend analysis in business planning fosters the objectivity to create a solid basis for a corporate decision-making process. This paper deals with the Economic Trend Outlook Model which allows to consider macroeconomic influences on the company-specific capacity planning. In doing so, a company can turn into a proactive organization that makes use of advanced trend information and improves the individual forecasting accuracy. Thus this paper describes the method behind this strategy and introduces a stepwise approach using the examples of two company cases.

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Japanese manufacturing firms face drastic changes in business environment caused by the improvement of IT and the associated new business concepts, represented by IoT (internet of things), Industry 4.0, AI, and big data. Recent IT systems such as IoT directly affect the both engineering chain and supply chain, which constitute the design information flow. The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically how the IT systems affect the value chain, integrating the engineering chain and supply chain. To this end, we conduct comparative case analysis of IT system utilization, in which we apply the “material and information flow mapping” framework to four Japanese manufacturing firms. The contributions of this paper are twofold. One is to demonstrate the value of “material and information flow mapping” framework in IT system analysis, and the other is to reveal the details of IT system utilization in the value chains of Japanese manufacturing firms.

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