Can Japanese Manufacturing Industry Provide Through-life Engineering Services?

The traditional manufacturing industry should shift to the manufacturing-service industry that provides both of products and through-life engineering services. However, it seems that Japanese manufacturing industry cannot follow this trend. This paper discusses two issues of Japanese manufacturing industry in shifting to the manufacturing-service industry. Then, we propose “life cycle value creation platform” as a future image of manufacturing and point out the importance of “meso level thinking” and its education for encouraging design of the life cycle value creation platform.