It is no longer possible to gain the satisfaction of customers just by making and selling quality products. The issue now is how to deliver good products that the customers want. Delivery speed, how to guarantee deadlines, packaging formats that please the customer, guarantees concerning product lifetime and other added values provided for customers have become important.
  We started the Domino-K project in response to the changing times. Domino-K is a project that guarantees promised delivery deadlines are met. Although this is not a new product, it is a new offer. Until recently, this was more like an "added" service, but from now on it is a "basic" service.
  How do we view this as a system?
  We conceptualized a project called KAPOS, and it is currently being implemented. As mentioned earlier, the important issue that should be given the greatest priority in the business infrastructure of the new era is information technology, and we must make daring investments and provide education in this area. I want to make the company such that it will offer "guarantees" no matter the sacrifice. In order to do so, we first implemented KAPOS.

  The KAPOS project is a result of part of our research into total customer satisfaction conducted to date. It is a system designed to improve the efficiency of our supply chain management (SCM) network. The naming is derived by combining Kato and POS: POS, or Point of Sale, is the system long applied in the distribution industry, now redesigned to match the Kato style.
  I believe that investment in the information technology field will only increase in the future. Networks between computers will become deeply entwined with testing divisions, production divisions and other areas of the company. This will enable us to not only provide products designed by customers inexpensively, but also actively propose products.
  In marketing, we established the Smart-Pro Project in order to create a sales division that will heighten the rate of orders received and that can systematically attain targets. This will enable action plans and numeric targets to be linked. It will also eliminate the conventional situation in which reports were received one month later when sales targets weren't met. We will be able to consider countermeasures immediately if a day's results are bad and revise our actions the following day; thus enabling us to clear each day's target reliably.

  Smart-Pro provides professionals with strategic matrix marketing, and professionals are being trained to use it. Of course, efforts will be devoted to product development, production equipment and service development. If KAPOS functions properly and we become able to use sales information and forecasts, marketing based on this project can be pursued in earnest.
  Companies that wish to survive must build a reason for existence by offering unique services and products that others can't provide and diversified products and services that can't be copied. I believe that the new century for Kato has begun.