Friday Brief 29/09/2023 (W39)

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief! We hope you have all had a lovely weekend! Can you believe it is almost October? What a busy month it has been.

To start off today we would like to advise you that a New Work Item Proposal has been loaded to the BSI Standards Development Portal for comment. Please take a look at the story for the links to the projects.

Join us and explore how Digital Twins can benefit the manufacturing sector on 4^th October at 10am on Teams. Achieving net-zero within the manufacturing sector requires detailed understanding of your facility’s complex energy needs. To understand more, please take a look at the story with a link to register for the webinar.

Our attention has been drawn to new compliance regulations concerning the use of Russian iron and steel that has been processed in third countries – perhaps this is better expressed as the need to make sure you have the appropriate certificates from suppliers to show that the materials have not been sourced from Russia. Please see the article below for more details.

Jack Semple, Secretary of EAMA, reports on a letter that EAMA co-signed and which was published in The Guardian this week which urges a policy of alignment with EU standards and regulations which looks to be in the nest interests of a number of sectors of the UK economy. He also adds some thoughts on the UK-EU relationship arising from a speech given last week by Sir Kier Starmer, leader of the Labour Party which were relevant to this topic. Find out more in the article below.

There is lots of economic news to report this week and we start with an overview of a couple of presentations and the subsequent discussions that took place during EMO. It is hard to summarise these briefly, so you can access the presentations in the article below but there was a definite sense that most of the world is seeing a slowdown in the manufacturing sector with skills shortages (balanced in part by an increased level of automaton) and problems with certain raw materials as common themes throughout the week.

In our UK article, we take a look at the latest estimate of GDP for the UK and the major revisions going back to 2020. While the most recent trends are broadly unchanged, an upward to revision to the levels for both 2020 and 2021 mean that the UK economy is now estimated to have reached its pre-pandemic level at the end of 2021 – previous estimates suggested that it had still not got back to this point. We also take a look at the latest investment data and report on the results of the CBI Industrial Trends Survey that was published last Friday.

Our international news piece covers the Economic Sentiment Index published by the European Commission and the latest data on orders for machine tools and cutting tools in the US market from our friends at AMT and the USCTI.

Finally, a reminder about the MTA Forecast Seminar which is coming up on Thursday 19th October and will be held at Cranfield University this year. You can find more details and the registration form at https://www.mta.org.uk/event/mta-forecast-seminar-2023/ and we would encourage you to think about coming along. We will cover the economic outlook at both the macro and industry level and while our forecasts are mainly for the UK manufacturing technology market, the global situation is also relevant. In short, there will be something of value for everyone at the exclusive members only event.

That concludes the Friday Brief for this week! Thanks for keeping up to date with us and have a wonderful weekend!

ECONOMIC NEWS – INTERNATIONAL

European Commission Economic Sentiment Indicator, September 2023: The European Commission (EC) draws from a range of surveys to construct confidence indicators for five sectors of the economy and then uses these to calculate up its Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) which is converted to an index based on the long-run average. The September* reading showed another […]

ECONOMIC NEWS – UK

UK National Accounts, 2nd Quarter 2023: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published the UK National Accounts for the 2nd quarter. In the short-term, the main pints to note is that GDP growth is unrevised at +0.2% for the 2nd quarter but Q1 ha been moved up to +0.3% from +0.1% in the previous release […]

AN OVERVIEW FROM EMO

The biennial EMO exhibition returned to Hannover last week and amongst all the business discussions and transactions with customers, this is also a meeting place for the global industry to share our views on the state of the manufacturing technology sector. We have the presentations from a couple of meetings available for members to reference: […]

Cybersecurity awareness month – A guide for ransomware prevention

It’s cybersecurity awareness month and our cybersecurity partner Mitigo are sharing helpful advice and guidance. This week they are helping practices with a strategy to defend against ransomware attacks. This guide highlights the five layers of defence that you should have lined up against this threat to keep your business secure. Download ransomware guide

UK-EU Alignment in the Spotlight

UK-EU alignment in the spotlight The Engineering and Machinery Alliance (EAMA), of which MTA is a member, signed a letter, published in The Guardian this week, which urges “a policy of alignment with EU standards and regulations unless it is explicitly not in the UK’s interests to do so”. The initiative was led by Paul […]

Alert – New Russian iron and steel sanctions

Members need to be aware of new compliance requirements regarding Russian iron and steel processed in third countries. Separate but broadly similar compliance requirements are being imposed in the UK and EU, although on different times timescales. Concerns have been raised that there will be varying levels of enforcement across the EU. The Confederation of […]

BSI – International document on functional safety has been made more user-friendly

BS EN ISO 13849-1:2023 Safety of machinery — Safety-related parts of control systems — Part 1: General principles for design is a revised standard on designing and assessing safety control systems for machinery. It provides: To produce safer machines, you should buy BS EN ISO 13849-1:2023. Find out more here – https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/J2OiC99B5ixWvYIoRBkd?domain=pages.bsigroup.com

Understanding Your Net Zero Journey

Join us and explore how Digital Twins can benefit the manufacturing sector on 4th October at 10am on Teams. Achieving net-zero within the manufacturing sector requires detailed understanding of your facility’s complex energy needs. With multiple production lines, data sources and systems, and often no unified access to data, it can be difficult to pinpoint […]

BSI Standards

Please be advised that a New Work Item Proposal has been loaded to the BSI Standards Development Portal for comment. Any comments received will be submitted to the national committee AMT/4 “Industrial data and manufacturing interfaces” for consideration when deciding the UK response to the associated Standards Development Organisation. Proposal: ISO/NP 25500-1, Supply chain interoperability […]

Friday Brief