Around the Industry

Engineers Without Borders UK, part of an international movement putting global responsibility at the heart of engineering, has announced the UK and Ireland winners of the Engineering for People Design Challenge 2020.

Each year, Deltek surveys leaders in the Architecture and Engineering (A&E) industry to identify benchmarks, trends and market outlook to help businesses identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement. This year, Deltek is launching the 41st Annual Deltek Clarity Architecture & Engineering Industry Report for North America, and for the first time, an additional global perspective to monitor the same trends and benchmarks throughout the EMEA and APAC regions.

One major question for organisations dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic was how do you maintain safe, healthy, effective operations and develop your people without face-to-face training sessions? Collaborative work by Make UK, Fujitsu UK and IOSH has been delivering new learning experiences online to help firms sustain business continuity through the coronavirus crisis and recover.

Forecasts reveal it will take until 2022 for manufacturing to recover to its pre-COVID-19 growth track, while it could cost a potential £36bn in Gross Added Value this year alone, according to a major report published today by Make UK and Santander UK. In normal circumstances Make UK’s forecast for GVA was £185bn but the worst case scenario and a slow recovery sees this fall to £149bn.

Years ago, self-service kiosks were pure imagination. Today, grabbing products and paying without human interaction is an everyday activity. Now, companies like McDonald’s are going further and investing in voice-based technologies to speed up the customer’s experience even more. Here Neil Ballinger, Head of EMEA at EU Automation, explains what manufacturers can learn from large retailer kiosks, especially from the voice recognition systems.

Schneider Electric and Cisco have formed a technology partnership designed to help drive major advances in making smart buildings the standard. Working together, the two companies have developed, tested and validated designs that help connect building management systems to an Internet Protocol (IP) network with a secure, scalable and resilient architecture that is easy to manage.

Beckhoff Automation UK is bringing vision system image processing into familiar Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) environments with its new TwinCAT Vision software. The software, an extension of the popular TwinCAT range of PC-based control systems, simplifies the process of configuring and programming vision systems for engineers. Beckhoff Automation UK is now bringing the product to industrial businesses across the UK.

Engineering & Computer Simulations (ECS) observed its 23rd anniversary on 12th May quietly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its offices were closed as most team members worked from home in observance of Stay at Home orders issued in Florida, Alabama, Texas, and other parts of the world. At the company’s April All-Hands meeting held via Zoom, the team decided that, rather than celebrating the milestone with a party upon reopening, they preferred to give back to those affected by the pandemic.

Engineering has always been a vital profession, creating enormous benefits for industry and society and it continues to evolve with the growing needs of the 21st century and beyond. Over the last decade, the pace of technological innovation has accelerated at a rate never experienced before, whether that be from artificial intelligence and smart devices to programmable robots and 3D printing. By Keith Robson, Executive Secretary of the ERA Foundation

The UK’s Northern Tech Top 100 noted in March 2019 that almost a fifth of the North’s fastest growing tech companies are based in the North East of England. The awards, which cover the entirety of the North of England and Scotland, included 16 companies based in the North East.