Kohei Arai

Labor resource use for endoscopic gastric cancer screening in japanese primary care settings: A work sampling study

Objective Endoscopic gastric cancer is screened in primary care settings, but how much resources are required to deliver this service remains unknown. This study determines how much time and human resources are used for endoscopic gastric cancer and for each component of the procedure. Materials and Methods Upper endoscopic procedures were prospectively observed using a work sampling technique. This study analyzed data from patients who underwent upper endoscopic gastric cancer screening at primary care clinics that provide this service. The main outcome measurements were time intervals and total time intervals that considered the numbers of simultaneously engaged workers and were calculated as the product of time intervals and the number of workers, and the labor cost of individual components of each procedure. Results We observed 44 upper endoscopic procedures at four outpatient clinics. Pre-procedure (preparation and pre-medication), procedure (from intubation to extubation) and post-procedure (recovery and cleaning) accounted for 34.1%, 10.6% and 54.4% of the total time, respectively. Of the overall total time intervals (mean: 4453 person-seconds), 29.3%, 14.4% and 55.7% of the total time was devoted to pre-procedure, procedure and post-procedure, respectively. The post-procedure was the most time- and labor-consuming component from the viewpoints of both total time and labor cost. Conclusions Most of the time taken to complete endoscopic gastric cancer screening is consumed by preparation, pre-medication and post-procedures in which nurses play key roles.

Using profit information for production management: evidence from Japanese factories

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the relative weight of financial and non-financial performance measures used to evaluate production managers (such as shop floor managers or foremen) in a modern manufacturing setting. Design/methodology/approach – Using survey data from Japanese factories, the paper examines the association between the choice of profit, cost, and non-financial performance measures with two characteristics of manufacturing systems: interdependence and multi-tasking. Findings – The results indicate that interdependence has a significant and positive association with the importance of profit information, while multi-tasking is associated negatively with the importance of profit information, and positively with non-financial information for performance evaluation. Originality/value – In recent years, a significant shift has been observed in Japanese production management with many companies now focusing on profit information instead of cost information. For example, the past studies s...

Readability of MD&A Extracted from iXBRL: Computational Linguistic Approach

This paper clarifies determinants of the readability of Management and Discussion & Analysis (MD&A) section from annual reports of Japanese companies extracted from Inline Extensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL). Previous studies have focused on English-language information, with no studies discussing the characteristics of Japanese MD&A using large-sample data. Thus, we extracted the character information Japanese companies from iXBRL and analysed the readability using text mining. We found that 1) companies with large market value at the end of the term and companies with a high age have low readability, 2) companies with a large market value at the end of the term and companies with many foreign segments have many characters, and 3) companies with high age have fewer characters. Further, MD&A in Japan had greater readability than comparable United States documents. Our results suggest that firms with asymmetric information use simpler words for shareholders and, further, are conscious of shareholders who have poor Japanese. The academic contribution of this paper is to show the usefulness of iXBRL as well as the readability of Japanese MD&A using large-sample data through a computational linguistic approach. In addition, this research compares the results of Li (2008), which targeted the United States, with the results for Japan.

Simulating Customer-to-Customer Interaction In a B2B Financial Service Business By Empirical Agent-Based Modeling

Service research has emphasized triad relationships between a firm, employees and customers. To coordinate these stakeholders effectively, it is highly important to understand what service activities are beneficial to all or some of these stakeholders. Yet, the recent increase in C2C interaction may make the problem more complex. This study proposes a methodology combining statistical techniques and agent-based modeling, which makes it possible to assess the joint impact of each service value and C2C interaction on the payoffs.