In Japan, safety measures have been taken after an accident occurred. However, based on the basic concept of safety which is stipulated by international standards such as ISO and IEC, "preventing an accident from happening" is shown important in this article as a new approach to ensure safety which replaces the said old approach. In this new approach, all the hazards are identified in a scientific and engineering manner and they are eliminated before an accident occurs, that is, safety should be considered based on risk assessment. Also, this article introduces the safety standards which are created in a structured approach as well as the fundamental concepts which become the basis of future efforts for safety.

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HACCP and ISO22000 are well known as a system to guarantee the food safety nature, and the food production company works hard at the construction of this system. However, as for the disgraceful affair in the field of food, the range of the disgraceful affair becomes wider without being over. The consumer demands safety and reliable of the food, but neither is the same thing. The author regards it as "reliable=safety+trust of the company", and "the trust" is brought by the precise information from the food company. But the control of the microbe in food is the most important item in the food industry. A lot of food disgraceful affair cases getting rid of the trust of the consumer happens. And it is important to make use in policy establishment about the food security of the own company. The greatest problem in food safety characteristics was food hygiene, but, since "Fujiya" case of 2007, packing and new product development of the food including the indication and the quality control surfaced as a big problem. Furthermore, since a gyoza case made in China, author decided that the personnel management and food security became the central problem of food industry. There will not be the solution besides practice of the TQM in the food industry.

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With the successive reports on adverse events in healthcare, social needs for the assurance of healthcare quality and safety has been increasing. Along this line, healthcare society has initiated various of activities for quality and safety, including joint researches which have been performed through the collaboration of experts from a variety of science. This approach is expected to result in the development of a new science of "healthcare safety and relief", which is significant to establish a sound healthcare social system, This paper makes a generalization of these ten years initiatives from a viewpoint of establishment of social technology for healthcare safety and relief. It also discusses fundamental approach and future plan for establishment of social infrastructure to ensure safety and relief in healthcare.

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Nuclear power generation is the important source of electricity to the measure of global warming and energy security, on the other hand it is very important to keep safety due to radioactive materials inside. So utilities of nuclear power plant make very efforts to keep safety, and government of Japan (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency) and Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization (hereinafter referred to as JNES) regulate the activities of utilities by reviewing establishment license and design and construction approval, pre-use inspection, operational safety inspection, periodic inspection and so on at all stage of design, construction, operation and decommissioning. At this time, the activities on keeping safety are introduced through the activities of JNES in the following four fields those are improved inspection system, human factor, seismic safety and high utilization of safety information.

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Seismic risk is of concern for enterprises, since it brings pure risk that is very complicated to estimate and handle. The basic elements of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) were established in the late 1960s in the U.S. Since then, PSHA has now become the most widely used approach for not only estimating seismic design loads but also evaluating foreseeable loss by earthquake. In this country many people fully understood the importance of crisis management after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. Furthermore many companies were keen to evaluate their seismic risk in order to control and/or transfer them with some severe earthquakes after 1995 Kobe Earthquake. This paper is intended as an introduction of basic concept of seismic risk management. At first general definition of seismic risk is introduced with a historical background that probabilistic risk assessment was developed and used for seismic design and earthquake insurance. Secondly method to evaluate seismic risk is outlined. Finally "Risk Control" and "Risk Finance" is overviewed as risk treatment in risk management cycle.

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Product Safety should be the mostly prioritized issue in product design and development in order to protect customers from injury or harming property. In order to provide customers with safe products, manufacturers must consider customer's behavior such as miss-use or extreme long-term usage of products. Thus, we should identify every possible risk which may be encountered and implement inherently safety design and risk communication as appropriate solutions. This paper reports the effectiveness of risk assessment during the initial product design stage by showing the "risk assessment system" supported by the past trouble knowledge database which has been implemented since 2005 in Panasonic Electric Works. As the example of product safety design applying "three step method" as risk evaluation, the lamp replacing process in the lighting products is demonstrated.

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The situations surrounding FA (Factory Automation) products nowadays have been dramatically changing. In order to deal with the global production of electrical devices such as mobile phones, personal computers and different parts in automobiles, the processes of the development and the design tend to be mounting under the International Safety Standards and the consideration of environment. Demand for quality and safety of products seems to be rising. Nonetheless, we must meet harsh markets' needs of cost and time reduction. Our company is the relatively young FA products manufacturer, founded through merging several Panasonic group companies in 2003. Holding up our mission of "The Contribution to our customers' business development through the reform of producing process with our technology of the electronic circuit formation", we have extended the market. To realize the high-efficiency and no-redoing design and development process, we have unified the process and committed to FMEA (Failure Mode and Effective Analysis) activity, making use of SSM (Stress Strength Model) as an IT based tool to lead to more innovation action. FMEA activity, utilizing SSM, especially focuses on quality, inputting all failure cases we have ever experienced into SSM knowledge Data Base so that we can take out the related information with integrated dictionary structure to feed back the finding into design processes. Meanwhile, products safety, which we should pursue as well as products quality, is nowadays attached great importance to in all manufacturers including FA markets. Products safety is that we call the lifeline for enterprises, and Panasonic group regards it as the first priority. In the measures making use of SSM to prevent poor quality design, we used to utilize mainly FMEA and then partly FTA (Fault Tree Analysis). Now, however, we put the first priority on "essential safety design" through safety FTA and the structure the knowledge management system, which enable us to evaluate products including its life span.

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Healthcare services are advanced complex systems. It is necessary to construct "QMS for Healthcare: QMS-H" that bases the feature of health care to Patient safety. It is expected that Patient safety is achieved more effectively and efficiently if the QMS-H model development and the introduction proceed. However, after the introduction of QMS-H, the problem of Patient safety remains. It is thought that it is a management technology of the health care technology that is the professional skill. In the medical practice, the one is a dangerous act. If an unqualified person does the medical practice, it is considered as a crime. The medical practice has a very strong invasiveness. The doctor has the technology that can safely handle a dangerous act as a professional skill. Therefore, the plan and the implementation of a medical practice concerned have been legally permitted. The author appropriated the focus to clinical knowledge to implement the medical treatment intervention safely. The development of the clinical knowledge structurizing contents and the development of the IT system for using are tried now (PCAPS project). It introduces the activity of the PCAPS project.

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Nine principles for error-proof product design have been developed for averting safety problems at the customer usage stage. In addition, four phases for information processing (i.e., perception, recognition, decision making, and action implementation) were formulated on the basis of the skill, rule, knowledge (SRK) model by Rasmussen and the information processing model for human behavior by Card, Moran, and Newell. The nine principles are based on three viewpoints: i) prevention of errors, ii) early detection of errors, iii) mitigation of the effects of errors. The principles for viewpoint i) are ① elimination, ② alternation, ③ complication, ④ facilitation, and ⑤ concentration of attention. Those for viewpoint ii) are ⑥ normality detection and ⑦ abnormality detection. Those for viewpoint iii) are ⑧ effect absorption and ⑨ effect mitigation. These principles were examined both conceptually and empirically. Their application prevented safety problems at the customer usage stage in 93 out of 100 cases.

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Product array is widely and effectively used for robust parameter design. However, the product array may lead to an unnecessarily large number of experimental runs when the 'effect sparsity' assumption, which implies only a few main effects of control and noise factors and control-by-noise interactions actually affect the response, holds. This paper proposes a method for reducing the number of experimental runs. It is assumed that there is no prior information on which main effects and interactions are likely to be important although the 'effect sparsity' assumption holds. First, an approach is presented for constructing a balanced two-level supersaturated design where all control and noise main effects and all control-by-noise interactions can be assigned to the columns. Second, main effects and interactions that are likely to affect the response are chosen using data from the designed experiment and a stepwise variable selection, and the fitted model for the response is estimated. Then, the optimal settings of levels of control factors are determined on the basis of the objective corresponding to the response characteristic (e.g., characteristic such as 'a specific target value is best', 'the larger the better', and 'the smaller the better'). Several numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed method with methods using product array and SN ratios. Type II error rates in supersaturated designs are also evaluated.

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In recent years, there are many organizations causing the troubles/accidents that have great effects on society. Although technical aspects of these troubles/accidents and the operation procedures expected to be followed by workers/engineers/managers were well known, they occurred due to human inappropriate behaviors like intentional rule violations or unintentional errors. These behaviors are considered to be originated from weakness of management like lack of interests of top management or poorness of error-proofing activities in workshops. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a method that can be applied to identify such weakness of management, with it being not necessarily use. This study structured a model of the activities that an organization should implement to prevent human inappropriate behaviors, and then proposed a procedure of RCA based on the model, which enables inexperienced analysts to identify root causes to be corrected. This procedure was applied to twenty actual accidents. As the result, it was found the procedure was effective to overcome the difficulties in performing RCA and identifying the weakness of management.

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In this research, a new concept "business system" was introduced. A 'business system' is defined as a concrete scheme or procedures a company sets up to continuously implement its business model. Several Japanese capital goods companies have been boasting top shares in global markets for years. By analyzing these companies' activities which lead to gain top market shares and high profitability by adapting business system point of view, thirteen success factors were found. By aggregating these thirteen factors in accordance with the life stage of the companies, it was also found that these companies put emphasis on those success factors differently at each life stage. By adopting different success factors in accordance with their life cycle, the companies efficiently utilize their limited corporate resources. In this research, those success factors were proposed as guideline for newly start up companies to succeed in their businesses.

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