Reasons to be cheerful

Brexit. The global pandemic. The UK's perennial productivity crisis. These issues are not necessarily going to be high on anyone's list of reasons to be cheerful - unless you are Mike Wilson, that is. Ever one to be optimistic, at a recent industry event (online, of course), the Chairman of the British Automation and Robot Association (BARA) turned these particular challenges on their head, viewing them instead as opportunities in relation to automation.

Digital skills gap grows

The disruption caused by the global pandemic means that the perennial issue of a shortage of engineers in the UK doesn’t seem to have been at the forefront of anyone’s mind recently.

Going for green!

The last couple of weeks have been pretty positive for the much talked about 'green recovery'. With the ambition to create two million green jobs by 2030, the UK government has launched a taskforce to set the direction of the job market as the country transitions to a high-skill, low carbon economy.

A (re)shore thing?

While the coronavirus has seen many UK businesses step up to the mark and fulfil incredibly important roles under unprecedented circumstances, there is also no doubt that the crisis has also exposed weaknesses in many UK supply chains and highlighted just how much reliance there is on the the supply of critical items from overseas.

More digitalisation funding needed

It’s great news that Made Smarter, North West technology adoption pilot, has reached a major milestone, having funded more than 100 businesses. The scheme works with small and medium-sized manufacturers to help them introduce digital tools and technologies to help boost productivity and growth, and more recently, to help navigate the impact of Covid-19.

The new norm

If there’s one thing that the coronavirus pandemic has shown us, it’s that industry can be agile and innovative under the most arduous circumstances.

Culture wars

It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone reading this magazine that the UK lags way behind it’s global counterparts when it comes to the implementation of robotic automation - a fact that was underlined at a recent event hosted by automatica exhibition, the British Automation and Robot Association and VDMA Robotics + Automation. What is quite shocking though, is just how far behind the UK is - in 2018 we didn’t even make it into the global top 15 in terms of industrial robot installations, and overall robot density (number of industrial robots per 10,000 employees in manufacturing) is just 91 compared with 338 in Germany, which leads in Europe.

Release the robot potential!

Despite the emphatic Conserative win in the recent general election and talked-about flurry of contracts given the go-ahead in the immediate aftermath of the outcome, things still do not seem to be looking particularly rosey in the the UK industrial sector, with economists warning that the long term picture for the economy continues to be one of relative weakness. Of course, these are unprecedented times and I’m not going to pretend I understand all, if any, of the contributing factors, but coming at the issue from CDA-centric point of view, I feel that one thing is certain - if the UK is remain competitive in the global economy it must invest in increased automation.

Let's work together

Although not a particularly new soundbite, the trope that ‘data is the new oil’ seems to be more and more frequently referred to.

Will Extinction Rebellion be coming for your data?

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been touted as a powerful technology that will revolutionise the industrial manufacturing space. It is an amalgam of various uses at different phases of manufacturing, including generative design in product development, production forecasting in inventory management, and machine vision, defect inspection, production optimisation, and predictive maintenance in the production phase.