Skip to main content

Industry 4.0 – I Was There!

By
Last week we attended the Evolution: Journey into Industry 4.0 event and it was an illuminating experience! Not only did we get to hear from some of manufacturings leading lights in the region, we got to talk alongside them at Naame’s packed conference.

As well as having our exhibition stand, our Director Paul Grenyer spoke at the event, demonstrating the value of process automation within manufacturing and how it will support growth in the sector. No capital expenditure required! Paul was able to share the benefits our clients have already seen from automating processes, and have a little fun along the way too!

Other speakers included industry gurus from Loughborough University, the Department for International Trade, Knowledge Transfer Manager – KTN – Innovate UK, Cranfield University, Hethel Innovation and West Suffolk College. We were also fortunate enough to hear from companies already putting automation into practice to great effect, including Warren Services, asset intelligence group Pathfindr, telecoms giant Huawei UK and electric motors company MSF Technologies. We were also reassured that despite some reports claiming future tech would mean job losses, those at Industry 4.0 disagreed, saying job roles would simply evolve from manual tasks to monitoring and analysing. It was also interesting to discover that our region is leading the way in disruptive tech!

Henk Koopmans, chief executive of Huawei UK, encouraged business to ‘think big’ and focus on their market first, but the main takeaway message from the event was that engineering needed to play an important part of the New Anglia LEP economic strategy. The LEP is hoping for greater involvement from businesses to help define the skills needed in five years time so it can work with colleges to get those skills taught now in preparation.

For Naame’s part, it hopes to support manufacturers and introduce them to others who may be able to help with the challenges they face. They are also looking to create manufacturing groups in Suffolk – contact Naame if you are interested. The New Anglia Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering group are also looking to develop a strategic map and would like feedback on a consultation document being released onto their website this week.

The day proved to be a worthwhile investment, with genuinely interesting speakers and an intelligent audience keen to support and be involved in the next phase of industry in our region.

Interested in finding out what Naked Element can do to prepare your business for Industry 4.0? Get in touch for a cup of tea and a chat!

Originally published here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...
1 comment
Read more