Is Planning Engineering the Future of Industrial and Systems Engineering?

The Business Environment

As globalization rapidly advances, the business world is undergoing innovative paradigm shifts in management and its environment, leading to the kind of global competition described below. However, the nature of this competition seems to be nothing new. Why, then, is Japan alone so “slow” and unable to conduct business in a way that maintains its competitiveness?

・Speed: Improving the efficiency of staff and engineer workflows through IT.

・Delivery: Next-day delivery anywhere in the world within 24 hours.

・Cost: Reducing service costs for low-priced products from countries like China.

・Quality: Is the zero-defect "Japanese quality" truly the quality demanded by the global market?

Although these may seem like problems for the business world and not the academic one, there is not much research in industrial and systems engineering that directly addresses them. To solve the problems facing Japanese society, it may be necessary to step back slightly from the world of pure research and advance empirical studies through even closer industry-academia collaboration.

What Japanese business needs now is “speed.” We must recognize that Japan’s response lacks this sense of speed and is lagging behind that of other countries in adapting to global changes. The problem of a delayed response to change across all functions of management systems is precisely a challenge for industrial and systems engineering, which includes management as one of its research subjects. There is a need for research that examines and analyzes the factors and structure behind this delay and proposes countermeasures to overcome it.

Since this is something that cannot be learned from other countries that are more advanced in adapting to change, what is needed is not research that merely builds on existing studies, but research that examines global changes and Japan’s management systems to propose strategies unique to Japan.

PDCA

In the context of the “jitsugaku (science)” mentioned by Yukichi Fukuzawa and the President, I believe the “problem” in “finding problems for oneself” refers to the gap between a goal and reality, and “finding” refers to the act of setting that goal. When these goals are mapped to the PDCA cycle, there are differences between the West and Japan, as shown in Figure 1.

From the era of Yukichi Fukuzawa to the early 21st century, the application of the PDCA cycle in Japan (left side of Figure 1) involved the implicit goal of catching up with the West. This meant continuously improving Quality, Cost, and Delivery (QCD) through a shop-floor-centric approach. In other words, the Plan was a given that did not require much thought. By advancing improvements through a Do-Check loop that lacked an Action-to-Plan phase, Japan became the world’s top producer in terms of quality and cost. Upon becoming number one, Japan suddenly realized that its given goal—the West—had vanished, and it could no longer see a clear objective to achieve.

In Western management, the PDCA cycle operates as follows: top management sets upgraded goals through an Action-to-Plan loop, these goals are cascaded down to each organizational level and individual, and a Do-Check loop is then executed to achieve them (right side of the figure). In contrast, because Japan had the aforementioned goal of catching up to the West and did not employ a top-down management style, the need for the Plan phase was minimal until around the year 2000. It is undeniable that there was little study of or experience with a Plan-centric PDCA cycle.

Until now, industrial and systems engineering has contributed to Japan’s productivity growth by researching and teaching management techniques. These techniques have been useful for QCD improvement activities within the Do-Check loop, employing a shop-floor-oriented, continuous improvement approach to achieve the goal of catching up with the West. However, in a Japan that has lost its direction, improvements based on management techniques alone have resulted in the “slow” response to change mentioned earlier. Therefore, industrial and systems engineering is now called upon to research and teach planning techniques to realize a Japanese-style PDCA cycle—one that involves setting appropriate goals, deploying them to each management level, and executing them. I believe this is precisely what it means to aim to cultivate talent equipped with the ability to “find problems for oneself,” a core tenet of jitsugaku (science).

Problem Solving

As one approach to realizing the Plan step in goal setting, Industrial Engineering (IE), which makes improvements by observing the actual site and objects (see Takeshi Kawase, *IE Problem Solving*), categorizes problem solving into the following two types, as shown in Figure 2. This categorization depends on how “mechanisms” such as methods, equipment, and systems are handled (in the figure, “mechanism” is represented as “method”).

① The “management problem” approach: A Do-oriented approach that accepts the current mechanism (goal) and focuses on improving its operation.

② The “improvement problem” approach: A Plan-oriented approach that changes the current mechanism (goal) to improve and upgrade the mechanism itself.

As mentioned, the Plan, which represents the goal, is something discussed within the management structure. To realize a goal-driven management style in Japan, some companies are attempting to directly import the Western top-down PDCA cycle. However, this means that the resulting style is no longer uniquely Japanese.

In IE, research and education are focused on improvement techniques that create a spiral of ascending goals and achievements. This is done by repeating two approaches. First, it builds on Japan’s strength: the shop-floor-centric, participatory improvement approach. By thoroughly implementing the Do approach (as a “management problem”) to master and improve the “current mechanism,” a point is reached where a “new mechanism”—the next goal—becomes necessary or visible. At that point, the Plan approach (as an “improvement problem”) is used to develop this new mechanism. In other words, we are putting into practice the idea of cultivating talent that can set and achieve goals in a spiral fashion with a problem-discovery orientation.

As has been discussed, the reason for the struggles in the global expansion of Japanese business is not a fundamental failure, but rather a lack of analysis and research from a specific viewpoint: one that first analyzes and understands Japan’s problem of a “slow” response to change and then considers countermeasures. From this perspective, future research into the new planning techniques that are needed should prove to be “very enjoyable,” and it is something I wish to “promote as an academic pursuit.”