Japanese manufacturing created the second innovation on production management so called Japan model represented by the Kaizen approach to cope with market change. That is still a competitive edge not implemented well in other countries. However together with the shift to zero economic growth after the collapse of bubble economy, its strength has been rather lost and serious quality scandals have happened not imagined formerly during so called "lost decade". According to TOC that emerged intending to overtake Japan model, its most crucial drawback lies at lack of concept of constraints to connect Kaizen effort with managerial outcomes. On the other hand, Japanese country culture is characterized by strong uncertain avoidance which leads to tendency for people to think and behave so as to be highly intolerable to ambiguous situations, and make efforts to decrease them. This is a source of strong motivation to invent high quality and just-in-time. Exploiting this strength intentionally, a new virtuous cycle to materialize sustainable competitive edge may be triggered by management practice so as to recognize and forecast the constraints to connect individual efforts to managerial outcomes, and share them within an organization. This is also a way to convert "lost decade" into "redesign decade".

View full abstract

We focus on the triangle consisted of men and organization, technologies, and cutomers and market and also discuss their management considering not only individually but also as a whole. Men and organization can take the initiative to solve the visible or invisible problems existing between needs and seeds by seeing the real entity, joining the information and so on.
The results say that management utilizing complements and organizational learning by feedback do work well and play important roles in the sustainable growth of the company. They are very important and critical to stretch the span of attention and communicate intensively and richly enhancing the value of information by feedback approach. This gives the competitive power based on the thinking strategy and is different from and transcendental of the business strategic approach.

View full abstract

To gain the position of a top runner of the 21st century, the effectiveness of "Science TQM", a new principle of quality management, is proposed and discussed. The significance and effectiveness of "strategic joint task team activities" for cooperative creation necessary for the development of "Science TQM" are discussed. The formation of creative and "strategic stratified task teams" (Tasks 1-8), and the verification of their effectiveness within Toyota and the Toyota group are proposed.

View full abstract

Recently environmental concern for product design became increasing. The EU countries and U.S. tend to control the environmental performance of a product by regulation. The other countries who export the product to these countries are involved with this movement. The ISO standards and technical reports concerning DfE and CLA became to be much highlighted according to enactment of the EU directives ELV, WEEE and RoHS. An electrical and electronic equipment industry and an automobile industry may be the most affected by this movement. Japanese major set-makers for electrical and electronic equipment are recently constructing the supply-chain management system in order to confirm the compliance with the EU directives. This movement accelerates the incorporation of the environmental aspect into the product design system, and that is supported by the state-of-the-art information technology.

View full abstract

The embedded sofrware has been developed since the latter half of 1970's. The quality technology of the embedded software that we applied are TQC in 1980's, ISO 9001 in 1990's, and capability maturity mode from 2000. However, the quality problem occurs still. Those Quality technologies are not effective to achieve high Quality. They have only established the procedure of the quality system. It is necessary to improve the quality of process. Products services which fulfills customer's needs and expectation can be offered by applying the process network technology. The process network include not only product realization process but also support process and management process. The process network technology consists of the process network analysis (PNA) technology, the process network design technology (PND), and the process network management technology (PNM). A chronic symptom was analyzed using PNA. The next generation quality technological theme obtained from the analysis is corresponding to the quality technology for sustainable prosperity. An important process is a process where technological succession process and CEO are reeducated. CQO educates engineer, manager, and CEO in the quality. The most important process is an assign process of CQO.

View full abstract

The authors propose HI-POS as a way of practically achieving intelligent productivity, recognizing the need for the creation of a new, people-centered production system that incorporates rich creativity and the motivation of those involved. HI-POS is comprised of three core systems that improve the intelligence level of production operators' technology and skills (an intelligent diagnostic method, HID, which assists in the discovery of factors inhibiting the attainment of high quality, an integrated assistance system, HIA, which links human wisdom to technical evolution and the dissemination of information, and HDP, a linkage system which utilizes a digital pipeline to ensure that intelligent production information is passed throughout a process, from design to manufacturing stages. In addition to this, HI-POS is particularly significant because it offers support for both the next-generation digital engineering systems already proposed by the authors, V-MICS, which improves production operators' operational technology abilities in regard to integrated equipment, and V-IOS, which improves levels of mastered skills. The authors have applied HI-POS within the cutting-edge corporate environment of Toyota, and have verified its effectiveness. They are now proposing it as a foundation global production strategy.

View full abstract

To provide outstanding products in terms of usability and environment friendliness, is the basic management policy in Ricoh group. In addition, obtaining the management practices that can realize customer satisfaction and competitive superiority at the same time, is also aimed. In this report, the following subjects are described. 1) The methods to manage the whole group, aiming to realize customer satisfaction and competitive superiority at the same time. 2) Characteristic activities within the product development process, related to the basic functions of a product, which are safety, reliability, and usability. 3) Development of efficient and effective infrastructure, that can be shared by all product development processes.

View full abstract

In Taguchi method, Signal-Noise (SN) ratio is used as a measure to quantitatively evaluate quality of products and performance of processes. However, the SN ratios are dependent on the unit systems of inputs and outputs, and so we cannot use them as a universal measure for good performances. In this paper, in order to establish a universal SN ratio, we propose the population SN ratio that is independent of the unit systems for the zero point proportional (multiplicative) model, where signal factors and characteristic values are positive real numbers, and we discuss properties of the estimators. Furthermore, under the assumption that the errors follow the inverse Gaussian distribution, we derive the distribution of sample SN ratio and test the statistical hypothesis of the population SN ratio. Also the data analysis based on real data is discussed.

View full abstract