Refrigerators are one of the only appliances found in nearly every type of home, whether it's an apartment in suburban Atlanta, a high-rise condominium in downtown Chicago, a beach house in Hawaii or a trailer in Texas. The humble refrigerator is also the hardest working household appliance. Day and night, it's constantly running to keep all types of food and beverages cool, fresh or frozen.

A linchpin of any lean manufacturing effort, 5S programs help to reduce waste and optimize productivity through better work-place organization.

Organizations spend billions of dollars on tools to bolster employee engagement, but the return on those investments is unclear.

At the Components and Logistics facility in Gastonia, NC, Daimler Trucks fulfills orders and sub-assembly of thousands of parts. The plant provides parts for North American truck and school bus manufacturers, as well as auto parts stores.

Manufacturing high-quality products is always serious business, even when the products are used for fun. KTM AG, for example, builds each of its off-road motorcycles with top-notch and thoroughly tested parts so that each model is "ready to race."

Optimizing flow and minimizing waste are two of the basic elements of lean manufacturing. Those concepts also play a critical role in laying out assembly lines.

When lean tools are used effectively every day, manufacturers eventually arrive at a destination: lean culture. All the continuous improvement efforts along the way will drive a cyclical culture that's sustainable.

ASSEMBLY was born in October 1958 with the name Assembly & Fastener Engineering. Although its name was later shortened to Assembly Engineering, and subsequently to ASSEMBLY, it was then, and is today, a magazine of ideas and methods.

Before the availability of electric lights, early automobiles were equipped with gas lamps for headlights and oil lamps for taillights. Electric lights did not become commonplace until the 1920s.

One of the top transmission assembly plants in the world is Ford Motor Co.'s Van Dyke facility in Sterling Heights, MI. It's part of a network of Ford factories that mass-produce axles, engines and other power train components used in the company's cars and trucks.