Lean Manufacturing in Public Services: Prospects for Value Creation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the utilization of lean manufacturing systems in public service operations for poten- tial added value. A case study of lean manufacturing implementation at a UK city council was carried out using in-depth interviews with key personnel coupled with documents collection. The Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) was administered among front-line employees. Results show that lean manufacturing systems could create signi cant added value to the business and employees. A strong relation- ship was demonstrated between the lean manufacturing implementation and the a ective commitment level of employees. This paper is one of a few studies that demonstrate the applicability of manufacturing systems in other settings and that they can generate significant added value for the service department and its employees

Treasurehunt: Transients and variability discovered with HST in the JWST North Ecliptic Pole time-domain field

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) Time-domain Field (TDF) is a >14' diameter field optimized for multiwavelength time-domain science with JWST. It has been observed across the electromagnetic spectrum both from the ground and from space, including with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). As part of HST observations over three cycles (the "TREASUREHUNT" program), deep images were obtained with the Wide Field Camera on the Advanced Camera for Surveys in F435W and F606W that cover almost the entire JWST NEP TDF. Many of the individual pointings of these programs partially overlap, allowing an initial assessment of the potential of this field for time-domain science with HST and JWST. The cumulative area of overlapping pointings is ∼88 arcmin2, with time intervals between individual epochs that range between 1 day and 4+ yr. To a depth of mAB ≃ 29.5 mag (F606W), we present the discovery of 12 transients and 190 variable candidates. For the variable candidates, we demonstrate that Gaussian statistics are applicable and estimate that ∼80 are false positives. The majority of the transients will be supernovae, although at least two are likely quasars. Most variable candidates are active galactic nuclei (AGNs), where we find 0.42% of the general z ≲ 6 field galaxy population to vary at the ∼3σ level. Based on a 5 yr time frame, this translates into a random supernova areal density of up to ∼0.07 transients arcmin−2 (∼245 deg−2) per epoch and a variable AGN areal density of ∼1.25 variables arcmin−2 (∼4500 deg−2) to these depths