Each Korg product contains anywhere from 300 and 1,000 components, some off the shelf, some customized. So when managers wanted to optimize the entire product-development and part-management process, they faced no small undertaking, said Franco Ripa, hardware development manager at Korg Italy.

Ripa and his colleagues were looking for a product lifecycle management system that would let them manage parallel projects and share information in-house and with outside suppliers.

The company recently brought in a PLM system from think3 of Milan, Italy, that lets engineers do just that. Korg also implemented a Web interface feature, which allows distributors to order spare parts in real time. The reseller sees the object, places it in the trolley with the price shown, and the order is processed automatically at Korg, Ripa said. This new system has cut from three to one the number of employees needed to oversee the spare-parts system

The company has now moved to the next phase of the PLM project: the exchange of parts lists with China, Ripa said.

At Korg, product engineering is done in Italy, and two facilities in China handle production.

“At present we transfer the lists manually on Excel spreadsheets, which take a considerable time to draft and check,” Ripa said. “Our objective is to ensure that our parts list is automatically present on the Chinese management system. This will enable considerable savings in the time and resources needed to manage the lists and reduce the amount of human error present in the current system.”

Turns out that, for the last few years, the 30-year-old Montreal-raised son of folksingers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III has been a tad self-destructive.

But last year he went to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse. And the consummate New York party boy also claims to be focusing more on what’s really important to him. “After 9/11 and the war in Iraq, I felt, ‘You better get all your stuff out now before it’s closing time.’” He recorded 30 songs and plans to release Want Two next spring.

Wainwright admits that he’d also like more than just critical acclaim before it’s all over. “I want to get Want into Wal-Mart,” he says. “I’m walking on a lot of thin ice, in terms of being gay and singing about drug use and adult subject matter. So I’m trying to be tactful, considering the innately puritanical nature of the United States.”

Even with his attempts to bury themes that might make Americans nervous, Wainwright has made an intensely personal album with raw cries for help and depictions of his turbulent relationship with his father. And it’s all done in his unique piano, operatic, cabaret pop style. Call it the music of self-actualization — getting clean has rarely sounded so pretty.

His years of teaching music at the Juilliard School and at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, both in New York City, brought him recognition as well, as has his extensive list of piano-class teaching books.

But talk to Pace, who was named in November to the Music Educators Hall of Fame, and you learn there is much more to his story.

His is a life lived in music, Pace says, from piano and trombone lessons as a child, to student conducting for his high school band and orchestra. Hearing his mother play the piano drew him to that instrument. Listening to his grandparents’ recording of Sousa marches on the RCA Victrola made him want to learn to play the trombone.

However, more than anything he remembers the Kansas schools where music was an integral part of the curriculum.

“Having a school system oriented toward music was important when I was a young student, and it is even more important today. Music is a key element of the curriculum. It is not peripheral to the curriculum,” he says.

And the piano, he says, is the central teaching instrument in music because the fundamentals taught there, from chords to reading notation can help students learn to play any other instrument.

Pace offers another example of why music is so important to learning other subjects: the link between music learning and science skills. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy appointed him to a panel tasked with studying how the cognitive mental processing required by musicians could translate to the complex motor skills astronauts needed for scientific work.

His career as an educator has centered on teaching piano students to read patterns and hear harmonies. He theorizes that students learn piano better in a group setting than in a one-on-one setting.

Pace. 83. will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 61st MENC National Biennial Conference, April 9-13 in Milwaukee.

For a complete biography of Pace, visit www.menc.org/news in February. Information about the other two 2008 inductees, Thomas Jefferson Anderson and Mary Helen Richards, will be available there as well.