People in Robotics

Organization face a broad spectrum of challenges. A major challenge is the Great Resignation. In the UK for example 43% of office workers are considering resigning from their jobs within the next months. As a result others are having to take up multiple new tasks, resulting in feelings of exhaustion. This means automation is becoming a top priority for C-level executives. Rocking Robots sat down with Gavin Mee, MD of Northern Europe at UiPath, to discuss these trends.

In a few weeks the city of Rotterdam will host the European Robotics Forum (ERF). At this event science, business and public sector will meet to discuss all aspects of robotics. Rocking Robots will cover ERF as mediapartner., Preceding this event sat down for a preview with Professor Stefano Stramigioli and Nico Nijenhuis of Twente University, which organizes ERF on behalf of EU Robotics.

This year, it took Denmark less than three months to use our share of the world’s natural resources for 2022, and last year it took the world less than seven months to hit Earth Overshoot Day.

Many organisations, both in government and in business, now have experience with digital employees. But implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) successfully at an operational level is not the same as taking strategic advantage of this technology. This is where Frank Mester of MvR Digital Workforce sees more and more questions arising, especially now that robotisation has become an irreversible phenomenon.

CFOs are right to look at RPA for bottom line reasons first—but practitioners speaking at last week’s CFO AX webinar on what’s on the digital transformation horizon for Finance teams revealed that automation is actually being influenced by a number of business and non-business factors.

How do you accelerate RPA in the US federal government, an entity with over two million civilian employees across more than one hundred agencies? Gerard Badorrek has tackled this challenge as the CFO of a US Government Agency.  

Leadership, for example by the CFO, is a critical element in successfully automating processes in organizations. RPA pioneer Asher Lake will be talking about this subject at UiPath Together 2022, the largest software event in the Benelux, to be held in a few weeks in Amsterdam. Rocking Robots talked to him about the lessons he learned in automating with RPA at, among others, KLM Air France. ‘It’s all about building a movement in your organization.’

Robot sales in North America reached a record $2B in 2021 driven by urgent manufacturing challenges such as labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and more. The U.S. robotics industry has proven exceptional at meeting demand, according to a report from HowToRobot.com, Gain & Co. and The Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) today announced six winners of the 2022 Engelberger Robotics Awards, the world’s most prestigious robotics honor. At a special dinner in conjunction with the Automate 2022 Show and Conference in Detroit on June 8, Michael P. Jacobs of Applied Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) will be honored for his leadership in automation while Oussama Khatib of Stanford University will be awarded for education and Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics for technology.

The UK is one of the front runners in automation. A lot of companies have moved beyond just RPA, and added technology such as process mining and AI to their business. This change has implications for the involvement of the CFO in IT investments. “The C suite has to not only buy into it even but champion it more than anything else, because they’ve paid for costly mistakes in the past already.”