Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Wednesday saw the MTA’s first open access Technical Day, at the Jaguar Visitor Centre in Castle Bromwich. The Day gave MTA members an opportunity to connect with companies in the Additive and Digital Manufacturing industry. They made new contacts and learnt more about emerging technologies and what the MTA is doing in the space.
At MTA we are always looking for ways to provide you with useful technology information to help you do business. Therefore, we have created a booklet around Standards currently under development. This booklet to provides information on the BSI committees the MTA attends, the standards under revision in each committee and the development stage of each standard under revision. See the story below.
The MTA is hosting an Engineering Digital Mash-up event at Yamazaki Mazak in Worcester on 27th June, in partnership with Stirling Media and with support from the Worcestershire LEP and DRL Tool. This free full day event is aimed at SMEs looking to adopt digital technologies within their workforce. Find out more on this exciting event in the story below.
Staying with our events, the MTA Annual Members' Golf Day will be this coming Wednesday (29th May 2019) and will be returning to The Leicestershire Golf Club. This is your last chance to register for this hugely popular day, to find out more follow this link.
The TRINITY project is an event which will take place on 4 and 5 July 2019 in Chemnitz Germany. The event is a free and open event organised as a “Deep dive” workshop into the TRINITY project technologies, such as, networked production, smart production, robotized production and other enabling technologies for Agile Manufacturing.
We have another update from EMO Hannover 2019 about what will be in store at the exhibition. This week we have a focus on the plan to showcase exciting start-ups, see within the Brief for more details.
MTA members MSP look to tackle the industry challenge of machining the perfect part with an expert-led Technical event on the 5th June. Hosted in conjunction with Renishaw at their Gloucestershire Innovation Centre, event attendees will learn how to overcome a variety of key manufacturing challenges. Find out how to register in the story below.
For any members looking into the Chinese market we have a report from the first The First LEAP Expo 2018 which took place in Shenzhen. The exhibition was held along with other three exhibitions - the Shenzhen International Electronics Manufacturing Automation Expo, productronica South China and Laser South China. Find out more about the event below.
The latest results from the CBI Industrial Trends Survey were reasonably positive with output continuing to grow in the latest 3 month period and although the short-term outlook is less good, it is only flat and not a collapse. Order books are weaker, so this is probably the driver of the flattening of the output trend and the survey continues to show stocks at a high level, a theme we will return to shortly. First, however, we report the latest European industrial production numbers; these look to have recovered from their wobble at the end of 2018, but are only back to the level we saw through most of 2018. The European GDP data was also reasonably positive and apart from the impact of the UK data, largely free from the stock-building cycle that is complicati9ng our data at the moment. However, the numbers only matched what we saw at the start of 2018, so the annualised rates of growth were unchanged at +1.2% for the Euro-zone and +1.5% for the EU28. Returning to UK data, we note briefly the latest productivity figures and take a slightly more in depth look at the poor trade data that the ONS published last week. With a very sharp rise in imports, the UK’s trade deficit in goods was at its widest ever level, although this is exaggerated by a rise in imports of non-monetary gold and the effect of the pre-Brexit stock-building in industries such as pharmaceuticals.
That’s all for this week have a great bank holiday from everyone at the MTA, we’ll be back next week with more industry news and views.
