Purpose – This study aims to describe how a work team adapted to its fluctuated and severe environment by changing from “lean” to “over-lean” mode. To do this, the author investigated the relations among productivity, the vertical division of labor, and group leaders' behavior in a Japanese automobile assembly plant. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted field study at an assembly plant for five months. They collected three plant-level data to investigate the capability of its shop floor: transition of production volume; transition of the number of workers; and productivity. And they collected two types of workforce data: skill map and work shift. Moreover, they videotaped the behavior of group leaders on several days and analyzed them through a time study. Findings – The work team of this study achieved high productivity even in its tough environment. However, the authors' time study of group leaders showed that the group leaders, who usually engage in some management activities outside of the production line, did many tasks within the line. This indicates the team had a weakness toward the change of team members. Changing to this over-lean mode enabled the team to survive in a short-run, but maintaining the mode has a weakness in enhancing long-term competitiveness. Originality/value – This study proposes a balance between the two modes is required for organizations if they are to survive their severe and fluctuating environments.

Studies of the value stream mapping (VSM) in Western journals report that leveraging VSM as a lean tool results in performance improvements. However, in these articles, VSM is functioning as a tool for partial optimization, attempting to identify and resolve bottlenecks in individual functions and divisions, primarily in production activities. For that reason, the greater the degree to which VSM underpins success, the more it deviates from the original essence of lean production and flow management, promoting overall optimization by focusing on the flows across the value chain, and potentially leading to poorer performance in the overall value flows up to the customer.

Beginning in the latter half of the 1990s through the early 2000s, research on dynamic capability (DC) emerged. Teece, Pisano, and Shuen (1997) were famous for being quoted even while only having a working paper, which was subsequently published. They were followed by Eisenhardt and Martin (2000). Then, researchers such as Zollo and Winter (2002) studied routines and organizational learning with a focus on the keyword "capability." These three influential papers cited the following concepts as elements that comprise DC: 1) the level of environmental change; 2) organizational processes or routines; 3) resource configuration; 4) the role of managers (for example, decision making with regard to resource investment); and 5) learning mechanisms. Later, many researchers adopted a resource-based view (RBV) and presented their studies as incorporating DC if they contained the keywords "change," "competitive advantage," or "capability" even though they were merely descriptions of static resource states and discussions of their changes. By casually labeling research on R&D, acquisitions, or alliances as DC theory, these later studies a) caused ambiguity and confusion with regard to what "dynamic" means and b) lost sight of the essence of DC theory with various solutions concerning whether the concept can be explained with the stable characteristic of capability.

This study employs data collected from a questionnaire survey of 97 business operations (factories) in Japan's electric and electronics industry to measure gemba-level and market-level competitiveness based on the framework of Fujimoto (2003). In addition, the employment situations within these sites were surveyed. The results of these surveys revealed that, as strengths of the electric industry gemba in Japan, 1) these gemba are superior in all metrics of competitiveness except for manufacturing cost, relative to overseas sites in the same companies; and 2) the high level of responsiveness to customers is the major source of market-level competitiveness. Nevertheless, the primary issue faced by these gemba is the skewed age composition of the full-time employees. There are few workers to carry forward necessary skills into future, and the labor costs of the veteran workers are increasing. Japan's manufacturing gemba must develop manufacturing competencies and improve design and development capabilities, in addition to nurturing younger personnel, to gain and sustain competitive advantage.

Since the 1990s, research has been done on lean production systems with progressive development of a scale for measuring characteristic leanness in efficient production organizations. For example, Shah and Ward (2003, 2007) originated from the HPM and IMSS surveys become as the de facto standard. However, the explanations of these studies were not necessarily convincing. In contrast, in the IMVP survey, site visits were made to automakers' development and production genba or sites in each country surveyed, in addition to the use of questionnaires. However, in actuality, a comparison of multiple Japanese automakers showed differences in methods and means for achieving just-in-time production in organizations, even at the genba that would be believed to score high on a leanness scale, such as JIT production. It is difficult to detect and measure these differences through large-scale cross-industry questionnaire surveys alone, and there is a possibility that this difficulty manifests in the weak explanatory power of the lean studies. Approaches to explaining differences in performance using "leanness scale" are based on a lean hypothesis where there is a best practice lean

A questionnaire distributed to domestic factories belonging to Japan's electric and electronics industry revealed three results: (1) regardless of the significant shift of production functions to sites outside Japan, approximately 90% of domestic locations are able to complete production functions to a high degree; (2) approximately 54% of locations are able to complete design functions to a high degree, whereas 24% are able to do so to a low degree; and (3) domestic production sites that are able to completely fulfill multiple functions (design/production engineering/production) have the following traits: 1) they are superior to their rivals at delivery accuracy and speed and better at responding to market needs and 2) they are superior to their transplants in China/ASEAN countries at making proposals and developing new products. This suggests that multi-functional a) Faculty of Economics, Seikei University, 3-3-1 Kichijoji-kitamachi, Musashino-shi, Tokyo, Japan, mfukuzawa@econ.seikei.ac.jp b) Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan, inamizu@e.u-tokyo.ac.jp A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2017 Winter (Fukuzawa & Inamizu, 2017). © 2017 Mitsuhiro Fukuzawa and Nobuyuki Inamizu. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study aimed to reveal the actual state of Japanese firms’ logistics outsourcing, and examine their relationship with LSPs. This study addressed the following issues by conducting a case study of six leading manufacturing firms. First, it clarified the characteristics of Japanese-style logistics outsourcing as: the outsourcing of the total activities, the consigning to a single LSP, and the development of advanced information systems. Moreover, it examined the logistics outsourcing performance from a sustainable perspective, and concluded that Japanese-style logistics management enables firms to achieve high performance in all the economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Second, this study confirms that the traditional Japanese business practice of long-term partnerships is still maintained in logistics outsourcing management. Third, this study also explored how long-term partnerships create sustainable competitive advantages. Finally, based on these findings, a theoretical framework illustrating the relationship between Japanese-style logistics outsourcing and firms’ sustainable competitive advantage is presented. Our findings may encourage companies to develop a long-term partnership with their logistics service providers, and to put environmental and social indicators into their KPI system to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by balancing the economy, environment, and society.

In this article, we focus on the firmware development process that has recently become larger and more complex in the context of digitalization. From a case study involving the development of the firmware for a digital multifunction peripheral (MFP), the firmware architecture have changed alongside the change in organizational structure. As a result, some suggestions are made for the generation and selection process of a product architecture suitable for multi-functionalization, as well as for the ideal form of interdepartmental coordination in an organization. Moreover, the limits of the existing arguments about the development of product architecture are revealed and a new viewpoint is proposed to investigate the dynamics of product architecture.