Why a successful reshoring strategy must focus on quality 24th September 2020

With uncertainty over a potential second lockdown and the continuing Brexit negotiations, attention has once again turned towards the prospect of reshoring, and how that could potentially help the UK manufacturing industry recover.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of long, complex supply chains. It has also shown how reliant many US and European companies are on the overseas supply of critical items, bringing to the fore a long-debated issue - are we ready to reshore? Here Harel Boren, CEO and Co-founder of Inspekto explains why quality is at the core of the question.

Engineers Without Borders UK, which is leading a movement to put global responsibility at the heart of engineering, has launched the 2020/21 cycle of the Engineering for People Design Challenge in partnership with Engineers Without Borders South Africa and Engineers Without Borders USA.

Joinery businesses are among the cheapest trade companies to set up in the UK, averaging nearly £2,500 less than other sectors, new research has revealed. With over 40% of construction firms expected to make redundancies due to the virus, tradespeople may be considering going self-employed. IronmongeryDirect, UK-based supplier of specialist ironmongery, has identified the cheapest industries in which to do so.

Upgrading to the latest mobile phone or laptop offers the chance to get rid of the old and embrace the new, often in spite of your older model still working. In industrial settings, there’s often a similar pressure to upgrade, chasing higher productivity and efficiency. However, just because something is old, even obsolete, it doesn’t mean you have to find a replacement.

In the past, data centres were big and had to accommodate isolated, single-purpose hardware for every IT function. As a result, organisations had to invest vast sums in multiple hardware units, many of which sat idling the majority of the time, creating an environment of high cost and low efficiency. Here, Annelie Invansoon, Marketing Manager at Recab AB, and Martin Frederiksen, Managing Director of Recab UK, explains how HyperConverged Infrastructures (HCIs) have been transforming data centres.

What’s the craziest law you have ever heard of? In Sweden, it’s illegal to complain about lack of sunlight during the winter months. Bizarrely, it is also illegal to be drunk inside a British pub. Some rules are made to be broken, but in pharmaceutical manufacturing, the rules aren’t lenient. Here, Giuseppe Menin Industry Manager for Pharmaceutical, COPA-DATA, explains how technology is helping pharmaceutical manufacturers comply with data integrity regulations.

COVID-19 has dramatically exposed the fragility of today’s ‘just-in-time’ global supply chains. In this article, MakerBot’s VP Engineering, Dave Veisz, examines what learnings we can take from recent events to help build more resilient supply chains in the future. It is no exaggeration to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we know it. From a personal perspective, it has impacted on our ability to move about freely, and to see family and friends. It has changed the way we work, and the way we relax.