Environmental approach places the focus on a cause-and-effect relationship between the external environments and the internal business conditions. But that approach is an attempt to describe the characteristics of environmental constraints. W.J. Abernathy, K.B. Clark, and A.M. Kantrow attribute the Japanese carmaker's success to superiority in the manufacturing plant, especially in their process systems and work force management. They provide a paradigm for discussions of manufacturing competitiveness comparison. The structure of the paradigm has two main distinctions. The first is the division between analysis and prescription of a macro sort and those of a micro sort, the second is the division between analysis and prescription based on hardware and those based on software.