In your business, you can't afford to waste time or money. Your customers' expectations are high. Your production budgets are tight. And there is simply no room for error.

Challenges you may find facing job shops include, but are not limited to: 1) variable work content between products, variable product routings through the production process, frequent changeover of equipment. In addition, Job Shops typically have to cope with a 2) high degree of demand variability (e.g. different order quantities) which translates to variable capacity loading. Further, 3) the amount of information required in a Job Shop tends to be greater as well. Therefore, Job Shops need a high degree of flexibility, excellent information quality, short lead times, and outstanding workplace organization.

All of which is precisely why you should attend Lean Principles for the Job Shop, a valuable one-day seminar presented by the experts. At this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn how to apply Lean Enterprise principles to your job shop. You'll discover methods for identifying and eliminating waste. You'll learn how to create value added products. And you"ll maximize your profits using the people and equipment you already have in place.

In short, you'll make the most of your valuable time and money, now and for years to come.

Lean Principles for the Job Shop will proved you with an essential understanding of Lean tools and techniques, including:

• Understanding the Principles of Lean
• Identifying the eight wastes
• Determining value added and non-value added
• The elements of Lean
• An introduction to Value Stream Mapping

This one-day seminar will be presented in Denver on Friday, September 14 at CAMT's downtown Denver location and in Colorado Springs on Monday, September 17 at Pikes Peak Workforce Center. Please contact Merrily Hill Smith at 303.592.4087 or merrily@camt.com to register.

Headquartered in Broomfield, Carefree of Colorado manufactures patio awnings, specialty awnings, and accessories for the RV, Residential and Marine industries. With over 250 employees, Carefree of Colorado fulfills its mission of being America's leading supplier of RV comfort and convenience products through a sustained commitment to teamwork, valuing the creativity and contributions of all employees, and continuous improvement. Carefree, in an effort to strengthen and expand those values company-wide, has partnered with CAMT to roll out an extensive Lean Enterprise training program, the first incarnation of which will last 18 months and touch every Carefree employee.

"While Carefree had many of the fundamentals in place, the reasoning, logic and cultural connection that tied them together was missing. The result was a lot of well-intentioned individuals attempting to make progress in their assigned areas without the appropriate training or tools to maximize the benefit of their efforts for the entire team," said Carefree President Jeff Rutherford. Lean Enterprise was identified as a tool that could tie all of these individual efforts together to evolve the cultural change that was desired.

Venita Fortune, Director of Administration, recognized CAMT as the team best capable of helping the company implement Lean Enterprise as the definitive tool to utilize the entire workforce to meet customer needs on time and on schedule, a long-standing corporate goal. Venita saw an instant fit between CAMT Project Manager Dan Breslin and the culture of Carefree, and ultimately chose CAMT based on the interactive delivery style inherent in all CAMT training. An additional benefit was CAMT Account Manager Aleta Sherman's assistance in securing grant funding to offset the costs of the training.

Beginning in April of this year, Carefree started the process of sending each employee to a Lean Basics course. The impact of this initial employee training on their understanding of the objective, their personal interaction and activities, and individual enthusiasm was recognized almost immediately. Over the next few months, Carefree will embark on several Value Stream Mapping and Kaizen (concentrated improvement efforts) exercises in various departments and product lines.

We invite you to follow Carefree's evolution through this roll-out as they familiarize their entire workforce with lean principles, uncover new processes throughout the company and perform advanced Lean Enterprise improvement exercises on various functions of the company. Look for periodic reports over the next year on Carefree's training, discoveries, and ensuing results as they fully implement lean principles across the corporation. Carefree's management has made an unprecedented investment in time and resources to ensure that Lean is truly implemented and sustained across the company. We're excited to share Carefree of Colorado's Lean Journey with the entire CAMT network.

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example of this "innovation inspired by nature."

The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.

Biomimicry is seen as one facet of the path to a sustainable future. Developing business products and practices that mirror the natural world will lessen environmental impact. There are many products being developed using mimicry. Below are a few examples.

Interface: CAMT was introduced to Interface at the 2007 MEP Conference at which John Bradford, VP of Research and Development, presented Interface's successful integration of corporate responsibility into all company aspects. One tool utilized by Interface to achieve a company goal of zero environmental impact by 2020 is biomimicry. Interface set out to identify the tools of adhesiveness found in the natural world in their development of i2 carpets. They studied frog and fly feet, cockleburs, feather construction, and spiderwebs, and ultimately found that the adhesiveness found in nature is due to gravity. The final product was modular wall-to- wall carpet installed in squares, using no glue, that can be easily installed at home or the office by the consumer. Learn more about Interface's use of biomicry and its products at the Interface Web site.

Furtech: Using "feather and fur technology", Furtech has identified key elements in the fur of animals on which to base the design, materials and fabrics of outdoor clothing and gear. Furtech's Web site details how feather and fur technology works.

The Mercedez-Benz Bionic Car: DaimlerChrysler has used the boxfish, a tropical fish that surprisingly shares many attributes with cars to design this concept vehicle. Learn more at the DaimlerChrysler Web site.