Material flow cost accounting (MFCA) is a major tool of environmental management accounting that aims for linking the environment and the economy at corporate management. In Japan METI has strongly supported MFCA promotion into Japanese companies, and more than 100 Japanese companies have introduced MFCA into their factories. In this paper, after a brief explanation of calculation method of MFCA, the applicability of MFCA is examined as a tool of production and environment management. Finally, the development of MFCA into the supply chain is explained.

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Most enterprises inducting lean production were confined by the innate limitations of existing production systems, which make it difficult to fulfill lean comprehensively. To solve this problem, the theory of lean design and management for the manufacturing enterprise lifecycle was proposed. First, the necessities of lean design were analyzed and its theoretical system was established; second, the principles, process, methods and tools for lean design was introduced. Techniques and theories such as lean production, facility layout, system simulation and simultaneous engineering were integrated to support the implementation of lean design and management; finally, a case study of a cold-rolling enterprise was analyzed.

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Development of globalization and digitalization brings us the inexperienced expansion of network or our subsistence space so that it gives enterprises and other organizations the opportunities to develop or expand their business. However it confuses marketable and managerial condition by the augmentation of diversification and fluidization. One of important managerial principles to adapt these marketable and managerial circumstances quickly and to get competitive edge is to pursue innovation. If we progress innovation rationally and quickly, concrete methodologies should be studied. However, the current situation of research has not achieved such level in both of academic and practical world. We call rational innovation as systematic innovation and have studied the fundamental research for it. Specifically, innovation capability to guide concrete methodologies for innovation management and innovation process has been studied. In this paper, the outline of our studies is introduced; at the same time research issues of innovation management toward systematic innovation is investigated. We should examine the effect of digitalization and the role of IT in innovation so that the issues related to such theme is investigated.

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Because technological activities for manufacturing are inseparably related to IT, situations of the active use of IT for manufacturing are described comprehensively. An integration of IT capability and organizational capability could contribute to realize effective new products development, production management for lean operation of manufacturing, activation of organizational kaizen activities and so on. The essential requirement for capability of IT utilization in order to realize sustainable growth at manufacturing industries should be strength IT management capability not only IT capability through management technologies such as TQM, TPM and TPS.

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Management information system consists of three factors; technology, engineering and management. Traditionally, administration has been recognized as the activity on two-dimensional plate constituted from technology as static managerial resource, and engineering as knowledge to produce the artifacts. The manufacturing in the industrialized society was achieved by elemental technology, hardware and experience/intuition of peoples. However, the manufacturing in the information society needs to be accomplished by systems, software and theory. This paper suggests that Japanese manufacturing has to build up management capability to make skillfully use of elemental technology, hardware and experience/intuition of peoples.

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This paper identifies the proximate causes of the Japanese PV industry's steady growth through the mid-1990s, rapid growth from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, and sudden loss of market share after 2005. The analysis shows that its rise resulted from the confluence of governmental industrial policy, firms' entrepreneurship, and university research and its decline occurred because of rapid market growth and global competition triggered by feed-in-tariff policies put in place by European countries. Now, the PV industry is entering a new stage of competition and Japanese companies have started to change their business models to compete more effectively with their Chinese and German competitors.

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Conventional methodologies to manage safety of engineering plants, such as manuals and databases of past failures, are not always sufficient for structured visualization and flexible updating of knowledge. This paper proposes a new knowledge management methodology using argumentation model, which consists of chains of arguments and counter-arguments on safety. The results of some case studies for structuring knowledge in the field of geological disposal successfully show that safety concept can be visualized with the new media, argumentation model. In addition, the results of dry-run community shows that the argumentation models can be flexibly structured and altered by the activity of communities of people who have interests in geological disposal.

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