FEATURES

Kaizen blitz

Take lessons from the NFL to keep process improvement from dying
By Satya S. Chakravorty and Richard M. Franza

Simplifying for savings 

University-corporate collaboration develops tool that helped reduce tire product complexity at Goodyear
By Nihal Orfi, Asli Sahin-Sariisik and Janis Terpenny

TLC for your PLCs 

Maintaining machines should include safety training for their “brains”
By Don Fitchett

Loving life longer 

CDC shortchanges true life expectancy in the United States
By Hoang Pham

FRONT LINE

Top stories in this month's industrial engineering news

• Cornell professor: There will always be pharmaceutical supply chain challenges
• Researchers find CEOs spend one-third of their time in meetings
• Iowa State IE students work with Des Moines-based health system
• Massachusetts fish farming may get boost from facility planning
• Toronto University engineers: Microfluidic chips to analyze bitumen behavior
• IE firm in the United Kingdom wins its first PLC Award
• Book of the month: Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change by Chris Zook and James Allen

PERSPECTIVES

Performance by Kevin McManus 

Mastery math

Management by Paul Engle 

The cloud has arrived

Health Systems by D. Junell Scheeres 

Patient-centered care, take one

Supply Chain by James A. Tompkins 

Supply chain in the C-suite

FOCUS

This month in IIE news

The April issue features comments by the new president-elect of IIE; details about open positions on the IIE Board of Trustees; a review of the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference 2012; an interview with IIE Annual Conference speaker Russell Barton; a call for papers from the new IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering; and an opening for editor-in-chief of IIE Transactions.