Although the performance of drones is evolving day by day and their use in various industrial fields has already begun, there is unfortunately no proof that the skills and safety awareness of the pilots and flight controllers who handle them have evolved in the same way.　
　This is due to the fact that the system for quantitatively evaluating the skills of pilots, which is software, is not yet in place, compared to the system for evaluating aircraft performance, which is hardware.
　The technical assurance of safe navigation, which is indispensable for the future implementation of drones in society, must be ensured in terms of both hardware and software.
　This paper, from the standpoint of a drone school, focuses on the soft aspects of technical assurance, and introduces drone piloting skill training for firefighters and its evaluation method using NIST sUAV-STM, a standard method for evaluating drone piloting skills that originated in the United States and is now being adopted in the firefighting and disaster prevention field in Japan. The presentation will focus on drone piloting skills training for firefighters and its evaluation method.

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　In fostering engineers who can think and make judgments based on facts, we considered the issues of variation, bias in data and cognitive bias.

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　As some of the efforts of the KOBELCO Group for “quality,” this introduces an outline of recurrence prevention measures and also the KOBELCO TQM activities linked to that recurrence prevention. The KOBELCO Group operates in a variety of business areas and the situation of TQM activities varies from one business to another. However, under the Corporate Philosophy of the Group, we are working to prevent fading awareness of past issues while also aiming to be a“ strong and good company” that can provide reliable and satisfying quality to our customers and to society.In the TQM activities, we pursue the realization of a KOBELCO style, including in quality caravan teams that work closely with the workplaces, an SDCA system based on our Quality Guidelines, practice-focused training to strengthen the management skills of middle management, and KPI management to improve ROIC.

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　Many companies employ problem-solving training programs for new employees and younger staff,and expectations for these programs are high among top management. However, feedback from participants sometimes includes comments such as “the content of the training is difficult to apply in daily tasks” and “creating A3 presentation materials was truly challenging.” Despite the longstanding implementation of problem-solving education in numerous companies, these concerns raise questions about why such issues persist. It suggests that there may be room for improvement within the training programs themselves. This paper will address five key issues related to problem-solving training and propose solutions, including approaches that can be applied in everyday work.

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　The second special lecture was held on August 26, 2024. This paper explains the purpose of planning the lecture and the survey conducted on the day of the performance. The questionnaire survey investigated the level of satisfaction with the lectures and problems with quality control operations.

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2024 The Japanese Society for Quality Control

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　Services have characteristics such as intangibility, heterogeneity, simultaneity and perishability, and are difficult to measure and evaluate using physical indicators like products. This paper focused on three points, i.e., a) more general evaluation items, b) service receiving process, and c) non-linearity between perceived quality and satisfaction, and considered an extended model of SERVPERF. Based on this model, it also proposed a quality measure that can more accurately express the value that customers perceive for services. Furthermore, it conducted a questionnaire survey for three types of services and examined the effectiveness of the proposed quality measure. As the results, it was found using 21 evaluation items newly created by integrating researches in the field of quality management, dividing the processes of receiving service into pre- core-, and post-processes, and distinguishing whether each evaluation item is perceived as one-dimensional quality element to indifferent quality element were effective in deriving a service quality measure that more accurately represents customer satisfaction.

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　This study took aircraft accidents for which detailed investigations have been conducted by the third parties as an example, and proposed a method to analyze the relationships between the accidents, inappropriate human behaviors, local factors, and organizational factors according to a certain framework in a cross-cases way. The method combines Reason's Swiss cheese model, types of inappropriate human behavior used in ergonomics, and the concept of cumulative RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for grasping statistical trends. The proposed method was applied to actual accident/ incident cases to examine its effectiveness. As the results, it was found useful facts for enhancing management to prevent accidents: i.e., the accidents/incidents commonly involve certain types of inappropriate human behavior; each type of behavior is associated with different local and organizational factors; there are certain trends in the relationships between the local factors and the organizational factors. Therefore, the proposed method is considered effective in cross-cases analysis of accidents.

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　On EC sites, it is difficult for the provider to grasp the customers’ needs for a product because there is no face-to-face communication between the customers and the provider. This paper focused on tangible products, considered a model that takes into account the differences in attributes of products and customers, and conduct a virtual purchase experiment, and examined the possibility of a method of understanding customers’ needs for a product from the customers’ behaviors on EC sites. As a result, it was found that 1) customers’ needs for products ( importance, and attractive / must-be degree of quality element ) and customers’ behaviors on EC sites can be summarized into a small number of factors, respectively, 2) customers’ needs for a product change customers’ behaviors on EC sites, but their relationships are affected by attributes of products and customers, and 3) by using these relationships, there is a possibility of understanding customers’ needs for a product based on customers’ behaviors on EC sites.

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