(Productivity Press: New York) --  The new book, 5S for Healthcare, by Thomas L.

(SME: Dearborn, MI) -- There’s no denying it. Manufacturing is changing and in ways you probably never imagined: new economic forces, stiff competition advances in technology, demands to work lean and green, emerging industries, and global markets.

Several years ago Tifco Gage & Gear, a division of Delta Research Corp., was an exhibitor at the Gear Expo in Detroit. Like many exhibitors at trade shows, Tifco was also looking for some new equipment. In this case, it was new gear inspection capability.

Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well.

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To improve customer satisfaction, enhance the quality of services and reduce costs, Peach Regional Medical Center has worked with the Georgia Institute of Technology to adopt process improvement techniques

The purpose of using control charts is to regularly monitor a process so that significant process changes may be detected. These process changes may be a shift in the process average (X-bar) or a change in the amount of variation in the process.

(TÜV SÜD Canada: Toronto, Canada) -- TÜV SÜD Canada, part of the global TÜV SÜD testing and certification organization, announces the acquisition of a product safety business in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

(SICK: Minneapolis) -- SICK, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sensors, safety systems, machine vision, and automatic identification products for factory and logistics automation, announces the launch of the Inspector I40 FLEX vision sensor.

The financial services sector has been a laggard in adopting lean tools and practices, perhaps because of their manufacturing origins. But those attitudes are slowly changing.