In the course of managing businesses, executives constantly face challenging circumstances. For instance, the market reality does not necessarily reflect the intent of a company's management. Disruptive business events may occur that are quite contrary to what the senior management expected....

While supply chain management has been approached from a variety of perspectives, the role of the global supply chain as a mechanism to overcome severe supply chain disruptions has not been explored adequately. This article discusses the ways in which Japanese manufacturing firms have responded...

Many studies on Japanese manufacturing practices have rarely compared how different Japanese vehicle manufacturers implement market flexible customizing system (MFCS). The aim of this study is to compare collaborative practices of Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi in terms of how they integrate...

In view of the unprecedented devastation of the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE), the psychological overreaction tends to emphasize the safety aspects at the expense of the basic principle of designing industrial supply chains that achieve competitiveness and robustness simultaneously....

The first part of this paper discusses from a conceptual perspective the impact that the fit between product architecture and organizational capability has on competitive performance. Integral product architecture is compatible with capability to integrate after a project starts, while a modular...

This paper reports the results of an international comparison of productivity in automotive product development in Japan, the U.S. and Europe. This comparative survey was commenced by Harvard University in 1985. The first survey analyzed data from the 1980s, and detailed results showing the...

In this paper we attempt to integrate the open view of manufacturing on the basis of design into the theory of comparative advantage, one of the bases of the theory of industrial competitiveness. That is to say, we propose a "theory of design-based comparative advantage" from the standpoint that...

This paper attempts an empirical analysis of the "architecture theory" proposition developed by Fujimoto Takahiro in his "A Note on Comparative Advantage of Architectures," namely, that the organizational abilities in integration-based manufacturing that Japanese firms built up during the...

In this paper I investigate the issue of increasing complexity of artifacts today from the viewpoint of design theory. To be more specific, I interpret products supplied to markets by firms to be "artifacts" (things that are designed), and analyze various factors that make them complex or...

In the so-called "architecture theory," an anticipated proposition is that many Japanese companies, which have built up organizational ability in "integration-based manufacturing" during the postwar period, excel at manufacturing products featuring "integral architecture," and therefore such...