Beyond the factory floor, there is an even larger opportunity to improve performance. The true world-class competitors have discovered this opportunity and have extended the principles that worked on the factory floor to the upstream processes that feed production, "white collar" factories. They have reorganized their white collar factories, moving away from junctional organization toward proce...

"The share of children employed in English cotton factories fell significantly before the introduction of effective child labor legislation in the early 1830s. The early factories employed predominantly children because adults without factory experience were relatively unproductive factory workers. The subsequent growth of the cotton industry fostered the development of a labor market for produ...

Search is essential for constraint programming. Search engines typically combine several features like state restoration for backtracking, best solution search, parallelism, or visualization. In current implementations like Mozart, however, these search engines are monolithic and hard-wired to one exploration strategy, severely complicating the implementation of new exploration strategies and p...

After the discovery by Tevatron of B s − Bs-oscillations D and D remains the last flavor neutral meson system with unobserved mixing. Neutral meson mixing is characterized by parameters x = ∆M/Γ and y = ∆Γ/2Γ, where ∆M and ∆Γ are the mass and width difference between the two CP eigenstates. The SM box diagram in D ↔ D transitions is strongly GIM and CKM suppressed. However, D mixing can be enha...

Most of the hosts used to produce the 151 recombinant pharmaceuticals so far approved for human use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and/or by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) are microbial cells, either bacteria or yeast. This fact indicates that despite the diverse bottlenecks and obstacles that microbial systems pose to the efficient production of functional mammalian proteins, ...

■ Abstract Until recently, CP violation had been observed only in kaon decays. In order to conclusively interpret CP violation and test whether it can be explained in the framework of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, two asymmetric B factories, KEK-B and PEP-II, were constructed in the past decade. Recent measurements with the two detectors at these B factories clearly established large CP...

Turkish Sugar Inc., a public enterprise including 25 factories, is the first corporation of Turkish industry. According to the government policy, public sugar factories PSFs will be privatized as geography-based 6 portfolio groups in two years. As performance measures of PSF affect government, sugar producers, and several unions in privatizing process, a systematic approach is necessary to meas...

How transcription affects the way specific genes are arranged within the nucleus remains to be fully understood. We examine here whether transcription occurs in discrete sites (factories) containing the required machinery and whether these sites specialize in transcribing different genes. We cotransfected plasmids encoding a common origin of replication but different transcription units into ce...

To encounter the challenges of faster changing markets and growing individualization of customer requests as well as to efficiently deal with internal disturbances like machine failures, an enhanced adaptability and flexibility of industrial factories is required. In this paper, challenges in the engineering of adaptable and flexible factories are highlighted, which remain unsolved from an indu...

Autonomous software agents are dynamic entitities: they are capable of discovering a need for change for additional knowledge and/or functionality on the basis of their analysis of specific situations. Agent factories are capable of redesigning and reactivating agents on the basis of the information provided by agents and/or knowledge available within the agent factories. As a result agents may...