RIP in Recent Years, Japanese Companies Such as Mitsubishi, NEC

RIP In recent years, Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, NEC, Fujitsu, and Sony began turning to Americans to manufacture Japanese products. While Sony, Panasonic, and other Japanese giants still excel at cranking out high-quality consumer electronics products such as camcorders and TVs by the millions, it's a different story in industries with short product cycles, which require factories that must build what customers order instead of churning out products in anticipation of demand. Japan's great strength, repetitive manufacturing, is becoming its greatest weakness. This production-on-demand form of management cannot depend on JIT. Instead the American companies rely on raw-in-process inventory, or RIP. RIP calls for keeping a reasonable quantity of varied raw materials or components on hand to meet changing customer demand. Refer to RIP. A company that builds what customers order rather than what it thinks customers should buy has a strong ____.

A) customer focus
B) product orientation
C) sales orientation
D) organizational structure
E) customer synergy