News form the Australian Workshop

   Karen Brown (USA) set up a Kenworth tour. Danuta Kisperka-Moron (Poland) discussed some of the special issues in Poland. Henrique Correa (Brazil) suggested Rio as a cite for a future workshop. Pavel Dimitrov (Bulgaria) suggested a program to extract summary data from the files for purposes of providing feed back to those that answered the survey. Attila Chikan (Hungary) as Secretary of the International Society for Inventory Research has extended the ISIR collaboration with the GMRG. Profs. Macias (Mexico) and Flores (USA); Profs, Sprague (UK-USA), Wacker (USA, and Naji (UK) presented their survey results. Lawrie Corbett (New Zealand) discussed how data is gathered for other surveys. Prof. Boo Ho Rho (S. Korea) also presented some current information on Korean manufacturing. Prof Xiao Zhong gave valuable insights into current practical data gathering techniques he encountered.

A Special Acknowledgment to our Aussie Hosts

We wish to thank our Australian hosts from the University of Melbourne and Monash University for their magnificent organization and managing of the conference. It was well throughout and efficiently run. We also wish to thank Rod, Mile, and David (graduate students at the University of Melbourne) for their help with the conference. We especially appreciated Lisa (secretary for the Manufacturing Center and now honorary member of the GMRG) for her kind support which including typing and doing about everything necessary to back up the conference. She is terrific.

A very special acknowledgment and thanks goes to the Graduate School of Management Director John Rose whose generous support helped make the meeting a smashing success. He also gave a spell-binding dinner speech on the future of manufacturing education in Australia. He really challenged us with his description of the new visions, incentives, and institutional relationships now in place at the School of Management.

We also wish to give special thanks to the Director of Centre for Manufacturing Engineering, John Marshall In addition to financial support, he helped arrange an extremely successful joint meeting with the GMRG, the engineering college anbd local high-level manufacturing executives.

Our deepest gratitude, however, goes to Amrik and Danny for their super-human efforts. Super thanks. You will be a tough act to follow.

Side Note: If you ever get a chance to have Attila tell his Mongolian stone soup story, don't miss it. It is one of the most riotously funny stories every told. Text taken from The Global Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 1, August 1993.