Category: Blog

Have you ever considered the benefits of employing your own apprentices? More and more businesses are looking at how to run successful apprenticeship schemes because of the wide range of benefits, including creating a dedicated workforce as opposed to hiring one. All sectors are suffering from significant skills gaps in[...]

Announced to huge fanfare in November 2017, the Made Smarter Review provided a definitive view of the UK’s industrial and technological landscape – and delivered proposals to put the nation at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a cornerstone of the government’s Industrial Strategy, which is why[...]

Successful football teams and brilliant bands are just two of the things the North West’s two major cities have got in common. Something else they share is the plethora of small businesses found within them. Walk through the streets of Liverpool and Manchester, and you’ll see they’re packed with independent[...]

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should." Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park, 1991.  Nearly 30-years later, it’s not resurrected dinosaurs you could apply this to, but its 21st Century equivalent, Artificial Intelligence (AI). The benefits of this[...]

The attitude towards plastic – and single-use plastic in particular – has changed massively over the last few years. Bottled water, drinking straws and plastic supermarket bags have all become less popular with consumers as environmental sustainability has slowly replaced convenience on the high street. It’s not just consumer habits[...]

According to digital security specialists Gemalto there were 945 major data breaches that exposed 4.5 billion records in the first half of 2018. That’s a staggering 291 individual bits of sensitive information stolen every second. Most of these breaches were identity theft and malicious outsiders successfully using phishing techniques to[...]

Most businesses, whatever their size, can benefit from automation. It makes the workplace safer by keeping people out of dangerous situations or harmful environments, and is usually more efficient, faster and more reliable than humans. So, if your business is at the stage where you’re thinking about automation, but aren’t[...]

Making sense of business support in your area One of the great things about running your own business is the amount of help available. However, to many business owners, trying to make sense of it all means can be time-consuming and tricky. There’s so much to digest, it can easily[...]

Put simply, edge computing is where your data is held close to your IT infrastructure rather than up in the cloud. Data could be stored on a machine or device and shared with others on the same network once connected, as well as separate server, accessible through edge software installed[...]

With automation progressing at such a rate over the last 25 years or so, it’s hardly surprising  one popular theory is that it’ll gobble up thousands of jobs currently being performed by humans, and eventually leave millions of people stuck on the scrapheap unable to compete with their mechanical counterparts.[...]