The overwhelming majority of logistics operators rank the endemic lack of drivers as having the most impact on their business. Does automaton and technology hold the key to overcoming the shortage? Ian Cranidge reports.
Imagine if your company was able to reduce the number of mundane, repetitive tasks that are completed by staff each and every week. Tasks that can often hold up sales, delay delivery, frustrate customers or, even worse, be completed incorrectly.
The Apprentice Automation Challenge – formerly known as the Home Automation Challenge – is the highly successful programme run by IMechE to encourage young engineers to stretch their imaginations and skills – and for the winner to earn a handsome prize of £2,000.
UK manufacturing continues to face significant change in automation and digitalisation, attitudes towards its emissions output and preparing its workforce for the future, while being beset by ever-shifting political challenges as the UK prepares to the the European Union.
The “seismic” shift from fixed automation to mobile robots will transform material handling within the industrial supply chain, as well as other areas of manufacturing – according to new research by a global tech market advisory firm.
Rather than making human jobs obsolete, advanced digital technologies have the potential to maintain, vastly improve and augment human skills, opening up new opportunities for businesses. Nowhere is this truer than here in the UK.
The 10th quarterly SWMAS Manufacturing Barometer included a ‘special focus’ exploring the attitudes of UK SME businesses towards robots, revealing where manufacturers are successfully using automation, where they are not, and what we can learn from them.
UK manufacturers are leading the way in automation uptake across key processes when compared with the national average, despite lingering caution over the technology's “potential for physical and financial upheaval."
