The entire IMS community should commend both the Canberra and Tokyo staffs for their fine work in making the move a smooth one with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. Yoko Mizuno as coordinator of logistics and office management. Professor Ogawa and Dr. Kurimoto are both familiar faces and veterans of IRS service while the Secretariat was in Canberra. Ms. Mizuno is also quite familiar with the IMS from her extensive service with the Promotion Center. In many ways, these arrangements reflect the changes to the workplace brought about by revolutionary advances in communications technologies and are symbolic of the IMS itself.
Email addresses remain the same.
Forum participants were drawn from the IMS member regions and included both those within and outside the IMS community. Participants were asked to bring with them three or four issues they viewed as primary change agents for manufacturing industry to the year 2020. With these issues setting a preliminary context, the Forum opened with plenary session presentations of five keynote papers. Forum participants then took this mix into seven breakout groups for further consideration and presented their groups' conclusions in plenary session. IMS should be continued.