Lean thinking has evolved from the Toyota Production System, but it is increasingly being applied to healthcare services. Lean focuses on continuous removal of wastes from the clinical processes whilst creating value from patient’s perspective. The current study is an initiative to implement Lean in the operation theatre department in a tertiary care Indian hospital. Of late the department was incurring performance decline and wanted to improve the patient’s experience by providing more efficient quality care and reduce the communication gaps in the department. Analysis of the “As-Is” scenario revealed many operational lapses like high case changeover time and non-adherence to case scheduling. Lean program created more effective working procedures and ensured a total continuity of care for the benefit of both staffs and patients. Operation theatres, where Lean was applied, showed a significant ameliorated performance along with an increase in the satisfaction level of patient’s in terms of service provided and improved staffs engagement and complacency.

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Research in the field of scheduling has been undergoing a shift in recent years from a focus on nurse scheduling to that on service industry scheduling at hotels and restaurants. Reducing employment costs and figuring out how to put non-regular employments in place to cope with fluctuating demand are critical issues in this sector, particularly when it comes to the scheduling problem to the service industry that depends on human service providers. To cope with these challenges, this paper proposes a shift scheduling model that effectively takes into consideration non-regular employments specializing in food and beverage service in hotel restaurants. It also considers the use of two types of the non-regular employments who are called monthly staff and one-time staff with different working arrangements.

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Japanese railway has high mass transport capability and safety record. Excellent infrastructure improvement, maintenance, and operators have been attributed for the high standing. However, there are few studies on its foundation of product development management of rolling stock. In this paper, we describe the actual situation of product development process and management of rolling stock T3 of Japanese railway company Z and compare it with those of automobile and aircraft, in order to clarify the characteristics of product development management of rolling stock in Japan. The Japanese railway company is a project manager. It manages effectively and efficiently a multiple rolling stock manufacturers who are its suppliers, and leads the front loading activities of product development. This characteristic may pose a challenge to overcome in the global deployment of product development process and management of rolling stock in Japan.

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Platforms have become important both as a business form and as an industrial structure. However, the methods for forming platform strategy have not been developed well. In this paper, we address the strategy of Japanese online social-game-platform companies. The online game industry in Japan is fast changing, and some of the companies in the industry show high performance while the others do not. We first propose a framework to analyze the mutual dependency between gaming platforms and complementary game-developers. Then, we apply the framework to three Japanese social-game-platform companies. The proposed framework is an augmentation of dynamic capability theory for platforms. The dynamic capability of the high-performing game-platforms allows the companies to both (1) sense and seize the driving complementary partners and (2) attain deep amalgamation of the platform with complementary partners. The findings will provide any company of a clue when it develops its own platform-based business.

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