1Strategy

• 1.1Corporate activities

  Cover the basic mechanisms that run a company: forms of corporate organization, the OODA situational-judgment cycle, and the PDCA improvement cycle. In accounting and finance, learn the difference between the income statement (P/L) and the balance sheet (B/S), the break-even point, and inventory valuation. Also cover human resource management and OR/IE techniques that capture productivity and quality numerically (seven QC tools, linear programming, statistical testing).

• 1.2Legal affairs

  Cover the legal systems that support corporate activity: intellectual property rights (copyright and industrial property rights—patent, utility model, design, and trademark rights). Security-related law covers the Unauthorized Computer Access Law and the Act on the Protection of Personal Information; labor and trade law covers the Worker Dispatch Act and the Act on Ensuring the Proper Conduct of Subcontracting Transactions with SMEs. Also touch on compliance and the role of standardization such as ISO/JIS.

• 1.3Business strategy management

  Cover competitive strategy (SWOT analysis, the PPM, core competence)—how a company competes in the market; marketing (the 4Ps, segmentation)—how it reaches customers; business strategy and goal evaluation (KGI, KPI, the BSC)—how it measures targets; and management systems (CRM, SCM, ERP, the value chain)—the mechanisms that put strategy into practice.

• 1.4Technology strategy management

  Cover technology development strategy (MOT, innovation, open innovation, design thinking)—how a company puts technology to work for the business—and technology development planning (the technology roadmap), which charts the path of development. The key perspective is connecting technology to business goals rather than treating it as R&D in isolation.

• 1.5Business industry

  Cover IT use specific to industries: business systems (POS, EDI, IoT applications), engineering and production management (JIT, the kanban system), e-business (e-commerce, the long tail, fintech), and IoT/embedded systems. Also cover AI use (machine learning, generative AI, hallucination, AI ethics), an increasingly important area.

• 1.6Systems strategy

  Cover information systems strategy (EA, BPR, BPM)—how to connect management and IT; business processes (modeling, RPA)—how to review day-to-day operations; solution business (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, cloud computing)—how to use external IT services; and promoting IT use (DX, data utilization)—how to embed IT use across the organization.

• 1.7Systems planning

  Cover the first stage of building an information system: systems planning (setting the overall direction for what to build and how) and requirements definition (organizing user requirements into specifications), which makes the plan concrete. Also cover procurement planning and execution (RFI, RFP, competitive quotation) for requesting development from external vendors.