This book examines current and emerging challenges in manufacturing related to the ideal of developing production processes with variability and agility on one level of the system, combined with structures ensuring stability and robustness on another level; close to what by other scholars has...

Preface -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- The Orchard as a Metaphor: Putting the Four Processes into Context -- Outline of the Chapters -- References -- Chapter 2: The Quality Dilemma: Combining Development and Stability -- The Quality Dilemma: What Is It? -- Quality Improvement...

Credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms are studied for the structure and its temporal change from the year 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite graph where edges correspond to the relationships and weights refer to the amounts...

We present a new approach to understanding credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms, and with this approach, examine the temporal change in the structure of the Japanese credit network from 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite...