A Wall Street Journal article (August 17, 2011) describes differences in the recovery from the tsunami across Nisaan, Toyota and Honda. While Nissan has 54 days of inventory in stock, Toyota has 34 days and Honda 18 days of supply.  The article suggests that Nissan built vehicles it could from its inventory of parts rather than vehicles customers were ordering.  In a presentation in Beijing, Professor Hirofumi Matsuo claimed that Toyota proactively worked with suppliers to ramp up microcontroller production to get back to normal faster.  Will the strategies to recover from the tsunami cause long term market shifts or just short term jitters ? Nissan’s more standard programmble chips enabled supplier flexibility and thus a permitted Nissan faster recovery – does that suggest that reconfigurable designs and thus supplier availability flexibility is a superior proditable strategy ?