Next, he'll sell coals to Newcastle.

• Position: Keith Morris - People

Picky, picky, picky.

Those Japanese are tough customers. "On delivery schedules, you can't be late by a day," says Keith Morris with a sigh. "They'll find another vendor."

Morris, 34, recently returned from two years in Japan, where he wooed customers for Assurance Technologies Inc. in Gamer. ATI makes the delicate sensors on the end of industrial robots' arms and mechanical devices that allow them to change tools. He won't disclose sales, but customers include General Motors, Ford, IBM and Boeing.

Through its licensing agreement with Kobe, Japan-based Bando Corp., ATI provides robotics for Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota. Thirty percent of the company's sales are to the Japanese, but they don't make it easy, Morris says.

Japanese companies require a battery of tests on a product: They want you to shock it, drop it and wear it out - and then give them all the test data, design details and circuit diagrams.

"They have to have confidence in the quality," says Morris, a Boston native and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who is ATI's technical marketing manager. "They really want the thing to be made in Japan."

He went to Japan in 1988 as an engineer with Erie, Pa.-based Lord Corp. in Cary. Morris, who doesn't speak...