A Superhero Helps Toyota Battle Bad Workplace Posture

IW Staff

Mar 3, 2016

Bernard Berry looks like a super hero. He’s 6-foot-7 and 290 pounds with 7% body fat. That’s not really a coincidence, though. Berry fell in love with working out because he fell in love with comic books. And the Global Production Center trainer for Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Alabama (TMMAL) has put both to good use.

Berry began drawing when he was 6 years old, right after he became obsessed with the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man comics he picked up in his hometown of Troy, Ala.

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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Planning Human Test Space Flights By 2017

by Donna Gordon Blankinship, The Associated Press

March 9, 2016

Private space travel company Blue Origin expects its first test flights with people in 2017, company founder Jeff Bezos said during a tour of the venture’s research and development site outside Seattle.

And Bezos said Tuesday that thousands of people have expressed interest in eventually paying for a trip on a suborbital craft.

For now, the man who founded Amazon.com is spending some of the billions earned from the Seattle-based online retailer on high tech equipment and about 600 employees working in a former Boeing airplane parts facility.

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Where Does Smart Manufacturing Fit on the Road to World-Class Manufacturing?

by Andrew Waycott, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Factora

Mar 9, 2016

Smart Manufacturing is new to us. But World Class Manufacturing has been with us, at least in concept, since manufacturing began. It’s only the definition that keeps changing.

In the late 1700s, General Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval suggested that musket manufacturing might be faster and cheaper if muskets were made from … wait for it … interchangeable identical parts. What a concept!

Until then, each musket was made in full by a skilled machinist; each newly-created part had to be fashioned to fit the eccentricities of its previously-made counterpart.

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