Canon Kabushiki Kaisha

Koichiro Matsuzaki

Takeyuki Nagashima

Keiichi Takashima

Hiroki Koyano

Hitoshi Osaka

Kenta Hara

Rikio Shiba

Keiichiro Yuasa

Toshihiko Kuwahara

Conventionally, for a product accompanied by supplies such as a copy machine or a printer, the demand figures relating to the supply which such a main machine consumes have been determined empirically from the transition of the past sales records of the supply, the trends of the market, and a sales scheduled figures of the main machine. Therefore, the forecasted values of the demand figures differ in accordance with the skills or experiences of individuals carrying out the forecasting, and necessarily, the accuracy of the forecasted values deteriorates. Further, a demand forecast method relating to the supplies of a product has not been realized due to the large number of parameters, the complexity of calculation, and the difficulty of a systematic approach for solving problems. In order to overcome the above-described problems, the invention of the present application forecasts consumption figures of a supply for outputting an outputted matter in the future, on the basis of inputted output figures of an outputted matter outputted by a product and sales figures of the supply.

Demand forecast device, method, and program product

There is disclosed an information processing apparatus comprising a setting device for setting, for each predetermined unit, attribute information for a character pattern to be printed in overlay with a form pattern, based on externally entered setting instruction information, a discrimination unit for discriminating whether separation information is set for each predetermined unit, separately from the attribute information and a print control unit adapted, when the discrimination unit identifies that the separation information is set, to generate a character pattern for the predetermined unit for which the separation information is set, based on the attribute information, and to cause overlay printing of the character pattern and the form pattern.

Information processing apparatus and method and memory medium storing

Growing community of inventors

Kanagawa, Japan

Koichiro Matsuzaki