Coordination between production and distribution in a globalized network of firms : assessing flexibility achieved in the Japanese automobile industry

Production and distribution of today's typical goods is conducted by a network of firms developed by a core manufacturer with its suppliers and dealers, and anatomy of this network is becoming an urgent task as transition toward more flexible manufacturing proceeds. Focusing on the process of order processing and production control, this paper investigates from a comparative viewpoint how coordination is made between the downstream and upstream sides in the operation of a globalized network developed by typical large automobile manufacturers. According to a measure constructed in the paper, it is suggested that domestic operation of one or two Japanese firms has achieved relatively high flexibility. The paper then addresses the following questions. (1) To what degree can production be based on orders entered by consumers ? (2) What elements are universally found in a network developed by large automobile manufacturers regardless of the country-origin of the core firm ? (3) What are the factors that enabled some Japanese firms to achieve high flexibily in their domestic operation ? (4) Why has their operations for overseas market lagged behind and what are the prospect of their offshore production from the viewpoint of flexibility ? The analysis on these points illuminates the role played by the rganizational skill formed and accumulated in the constituent firms of a network

Direct submission system and literature annotation of rice genes in Oryzabase

Oryzabase ("http://www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/rice/oryzabase/":http://www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/rice/oryzabase/) is a comprehensive rice science database ^1^. It houses a variety of genetic resources, relevant literatures, gene dictionary, DNA sequences, and basic information such as developmental biology and anatomy. In order to keep the gene dictionary up-to-date, literature annotation has been conducted manually since 1995. However as the publication of journal articles increases year by year after genomic sequences were released, it became more difficult to update the dictionary timely and in high quality without sufficient annotators. To overcome this difficulty, we applied machine learning and text-mining to extract known and unknown genes from journals. The machine extraction followed by manual annotation achieved promising results and increased efficiency in manual annotation. Furthermore a direct submission system where rice researchers can deposit new genes according to the standardized nomenclature ^2^ became operational in 2008. Recent advances will be introduced.

[1] Kurata, N. and Y. Yamazaki., Oryzabase, An Integrated Biological and Genome 
 Information Database for Rice. _Plant Physiology_ (2006) 140, 12-17 
[2] Susan R. McCouch, Gene Nomenclature System for Rice, Rice (2008) 1:72-8

強誘電体分極エレクトレットを用いた静電誘導型環境発電の研究

要約のみTohoku University桑野博喜課