Lean manufacturing is not about adopting Toyota’s tools, or using Japanese terminology, it’s a continuous improvement philosophy that becomes a way of life, says plant manager Billy Taylor.

Goodyear’s Fayetteville plant in North Carolina was struggling to survive in 2010. It was a high cost plant and it wasn’t meeting market demand. The plant was producing 31,200 tires a day, but the market wanted between 36,000 and 38,000. Something had to change.

As the sole producer of rubber in Ghana, Ghana Rubber Estates Limited has been able to lay down the blue print for cash crop farming in the country; however, as managing director Lionel Barre tells Jane McCallion, the company has implemented a policy that prizes partnership with suppliers as much as it does profit.

Famdra may be a small company, but its industrial weighing equipment is setting new standards for accuracy and cost effectiveness, as Gay Sutton discovers.

Against a backdrop of increasing competition from cheap imports and rising transport costs, Astral Foods’ CEO Chris Schutte tells Andrew Pelis how South Africa’s leading integrated poultry producer is going from strength to strength.

The story of Astral Foods’ consistent year-on-year growth traces back to its beginnings in 2001 when conglomerate Tiger Brands decided to unbundle its agricultural arm.

The expression ‘chicken feed’ normally implies something cheap and insignificant, but this is far from the truth when half a million chickens are involved, as Abdul Salam Akate tells Alan Swaby.

The green light has been given for an onshore wind farm in Wales, to be developed by Sweden’s Vattenfall.

The 76-turbine Pen y Cymoedd Wind Energy Project was granted development consent yesterday, by Charles Hendry, energy minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The wind farm is located on publicly-owned land managed by Forestry Commission Wales in the south of the country.

Once operational, it is hoped that Pen y Cymoedd will increase Welsh renewable electricity by 37 per cent.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based LB Foster Company has completed the relocation of its threaded products water well group from Houston to a new facility in Magnolia, Texas.

The Magnolia plant uses advanced technology and has extended operating hours to increase production capacity. "The new facility provides our production team with single flow manufacturing that expedites the movement of pipe through our threading process," said Merry Brumbaugh, vice president, LB Foster Tubular Products.

There are several lists of productivity apps that mostly relate to productivity in the workplace, but what about suggestions for people who are overwhelmed and need some help with everyday life? Below are a few suggestions for apps that help manage the day-to-day routine, from Jason Kirshner, President of Rocket Apps.

Tullow Oil has announced the discovery of further oil at one of its wells in the Kenya Rift Basin.

The Ngamia-1 exploration well, located onshore Kenya in Block 10BB, has been drilled to an intermediate depth of 1,515 metres, with the total net oil pay encountered so far increasing to more than 100 metres across multiple reservoir zones.