Anyone who is a Japanese businessman knows it. Whereas "minutes" is created as a record of the decision-making on the meeting, "Ringi document" is a record of decision-making using a circulated document which is circulated to everyone who is concerned, is completed with name seal (stamp) of everyone and the approver. Both of these documents will be stored for a long time.
Ringi is a unique system of "name seal-intensive Japanese".
Despite it doesn't exist in countries other than Japan still is present in almost all of the Japanese company. What to say, it's like sticking on to shakkan-ho (a Japanese unit system that was used in the 19th century), instead of the metric system. But for the time being it is not likely to eliminate. It would indeed have been met Japanese ethnicity that involving a large number of participants before the person with authority to approve.
Even today, there are strong demands such as "want to indicate something like a seal" or "want it looks just like paper", despite they have implemented the Workflow system and digitized. (In terms of aggregation listing and data processing, it is extremely nonsense...)
The following Workflow example is a Ringi flow that "prevention of retaining a large number of Ringi documents" has been built-in. It will help the managers who must give approvals on between 100 to 200 of Ringi documents monthly.
[Ringi flow (Proxy Approval)]
