Business process improvement used to be undertaken in a bottom-up rather than a top-down style. Soui
Kufuu (a Japanese word) is one of the main keywords when discussing business process improvement in Japan.
It means creative originality and ingenuity. Each motivated and skilled employee in a production line or back
office keeps improving the business process in their own way to make it more efficient. The accumulation of
Soui-Kufuu results have become a kind of intellectual property. These are the reasons that the non-hierarchical
business process modeling method has been preferred. By using this kind of chart, employees can share
process flow information with each other. Also, recognition of ingenuity can be considered as one of the
reasons that they tend to prefer custom-made software.