The aim should be to view your suppliers’ operations as merely an extension of your own. Companies like Nissan, in their UK manufacturing facility, have developed closely linked systems with all of their suppliers so that those suppliers have full visibility not only of the production schedule at Nissan’s Washington plant, but also of the real-time sequence in which cars are moving down the assembly line. By the use of electronic data interchange (EDI) and open communications, Nissan has been able to reduce lead times, eliminate inventories and take costs out of the supply chain. Other companies may have introduced similar just-in-time (JIT) systems, but often, in so doing, have added to their suppliers’ costs, not reduced them.