Happy Friday. We have another wide range of stories for you this week as business gets back in gear after the holiday season and as the schools go back across most of the country - hopefully there is something of interest to all of you this week.
The headline this week must be the publication - at last! - of guidance for placing goods that currently require the CE mark on the UK market from 1st January 2021. This will be replaced by the UKCA mark but there is a 12 month overlap period in which the CE mark (on its own) will remain valid and a further 12 months where the UKCA mark is required but can be in the form of a label on the product or accompanying documents. More detail in the article below.
The economic headlines come from the publication of the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) data for the manufacturing sector. While these were generally positive in having a better reading in August than in July, there remain a handful of countries below the crucial 50 level and, in Europe, a few that saw the PMI fall in the latest figures (although not necessarily below 50).
We have news of some webinars being organised by MTA associate members:
- Atlantic Technologies will take a look at how to integrate dashboards using Salesforce and Tableau to support business process forecasting – details and a link to register are in the story below
- NPL has a series of innovation webinars; the first of these was in July and is now available to view on-line with the next event on 10th September and the last one in October – again, there are more details and a link to register in the article below.
- Also a reminder that MTA Associate Member, Citation are offering a free, member exclusive webinar to help guide employers through the HR challenges of bringing people back to work on Wednesday 9th September 2020 from 14:30 to 15:15 and you can register at http://tiny.cc/MTA0909 and Citation will send you a link to the webinar.
We have an article on the new Kickstarter Scheme launched by the government this week to boost employment of young people affected by the Coronavirus outbreak. A separate article includes some other areas where guidance has been updated in the past few days, including the drive to get people back to work, submitting data to Companies House, the Job Retention Scheme (which changed on 1st September) and issues around providing apprenticeships in the current circumstances.
Crown Commercial Services (CCS) is a public procurement organisation in the UK that uses its commercial expertise to help buyers across central government, public and third sectors. In order to ensure the services and enhancements which CCS plans to provide reflect the needs of the SME community, CCS is entering into a series of engagements with the SME community and there are details of their survey around this topic in the article below.
The MTA Business Survey for August is underway and if you have not already done so (thanks to those who have) you can let us have your input at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-aug20.
The other economic news this week (actually last week but it missed the deadline for the Friday Brief) is the continued recovery in the Economic Sentiment Index complied by the European Commission. Within the overall economy calculation, confidence in the industry, retail trade and services sectors continues to improve and is stable for consumers while the was a dip in the measure for the construction sector. We also have the availability of the latest data set for the Contract Price Adjustment Service that we subscribe to on behalf of MTA members.
Finally this week, there are details of how to access the CECIMO webinar on “Common European Data Spaces for Smart Manufacturing – Maintenance” that was held back in July.
We will be here again next Friday but until then, have a great weekend.
