this one was the root of the so-called oiban kanri for series production management, of the seiban kanri for discontinuous productions and of the setsuban kanri for make-to-order productions. the study and formalization of this threefold approach were run later on by jma - the japan management association, who could base their work on the most significant industrial experiences to date (such as the application of the oiban kanri at kawasaki heavy industries). besides, they could enrich and tune the methodological contents with specific implementation tools and gave meaningful contributions to the definition of the methodology itself, which was named setsuban kanri from the reading of the ideographic characters 節 (setsu = period/temporal unit) and 番 (ban = ordinal number) + 管理 (kanri = management, control).