3.2. Impact of Environmental Change
As mentioned in the previous section, traditional (but after the 1950’s) Japanese-style management and
Japanese-style business process modeling methods worked well and proved their effectiveness. However, the
environment that Japanese companies are facing has changed drastically. For example, a decrease in sales due
to shrinking of the domestic market requires companies to make efforts to reduce costs in order to maintain
profits. Some companies have had to transfer production overseas in order to reduce labor costs. Because of
this change in the environment, companies have had to adapt in ways such as the following:
y change business processes to realize enhancement in cost efficiency
y change business processes to realize integrated business processes corresponding to corporate marriage or
enterprise integration within domestic or global
y improve information system operation efficiency (using packaged software is one option)
y improve system maintenance efficiency
y enhance information systems to enable analysis of business data to support management decision-making
y show agility in responding to environmental changes
Kayo Iizuka et al. / Procedia Computer Science 22 ( 2013 ) 820 – 827 823
Taking account of these issues, in the next chapter the authors propose a modeling tool to support interorganizational process flow adjustment