Monthly Archives: March 2020

DUBLIN, March 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "The US Library Expenditure Market: Size, Trends and Forecasts (2020-2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The US library expenditure market has increased at a significant CAGR during the years 2015-2019 and projections are made that the market would rise in the next four years i.e. 2020-2024, tremendously.

The library expenditure market is expected to increase due to an increasing number of academic libraries, rising higher education enrollment, growing higher education research & development (R&D) expenditures, soaring urban population, increasing spending on automation in the library, etc. Yet the market faces some challenges such as budget constraints, availability of open-source software, etc.

The US library expenditure market is highly fragmented with many market players operating in the region. Further, key players of the library expenditure market are Clarivate Analytics PLC, RELX Group (Elsevier), Alphabet Inc. (Google), Cambridge Information Group (ProQuest LLC) are also profiled with their financial information and respective business strategies.

Report Scope

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the US library expenditure market by value, by component, etc. The report also provides a detailed analysis of the US materials library expenditure market by value, by category, etc.

The report also assesses the key opportunities in the market and outlines the factors that are and will be driving the growth of the industry. Growth of the US library expenditure market has also been forecasted for the period 2020-2024, taking into consideration the previous growth patterns, the growth drivers and the current and future trends.

Key Topics Covered

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction2.1 Library: An Overview2.1.1 Importance of Library2.2 Library Expenditure: An Overview2.2.1 Factors that Affect the library Expenditure2.2.2 Sources of Library Funding2.2.3 List of Colleges & Universities with Library Expenditures2.3 Library Expenditure Segmentation: An Overview2.3.1 Library Expenditure Segmentation by Component

3. The US Market Analysis3.1 The US Library Expenditure Market: An Analysis 3.1.1 The US Library Expenditure Market by Value3.1.2 The US Library Expenditure Market by Component (Materials and Other Expenses)3.2 The US Library Expenditure Market: Component Analysis 3.2.1 The US Materials Library Expenditure Market by Value 3.2.2 The US Materials Library Expenditure Market by Category (Ongoing Subscriptions, One-Time Materials and Other Materials)3.2.3 The US Ongoing Subscriptions Library Expenditure Market by Value3.2.4 The US One-Time Materials Library Expenditure Market by Value3.2.5 The US Other Materials Library Expenditure Market by Value3.2.6 The US Other Expenses Library Expenditure Market by Value

4. Market Dynamics4.1 Growth Drivers4.1.1 Increasing Number of Academic Libraries4.1.2 Rising Higher Education Enrollment4.1.3 Growing Higher Education Research & Development (R&D) Expenditures4.1.4 Soaring Urban Population4.1.5 Increasing Spending on Automation in Library4.2 Challenges4.2.1 Budget Constraint4.2.2 Availability of Open Source Software4.3 Market Trends4.3.1 Rising Libraries' Budget on Digital Materials4.3.2 Escalating Expenditure of Libraries on Virtual Reality

5. Competitive Landscape5.1 The US Library Expenditure Market Players by Product Comparison5.2 The US Library Expenditure Players by Market Share Among Top 500 US Universities

6. Company Profiles(Business & Financial Overview, Business Strategy)6.1 Clarivate Analytics PLC6.2 RELX Group (Elsevier)6.3 Alphabet Inc. (Google)6.4 Cambridge Information Group (ProQuest LLC)

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ah9j0m

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United States Library Expenditure Market Outlook to 2024 - Increasing Spending on Automation in Libraries Drives Market Growth - PRNewswire

The global welding equipment market is poised to grow by USD 2.54 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of nearly 5% during the forecast period. Request free sample pages

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200305005298/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Welding Equipment Market 2020-2024 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Read the 120-page report with TOC on "Welding Equipment Market Analysis Report by End-user (Automotive, Construction, A and D, Shipbuilding, and Others), Geographic segmentation (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America), and the Segment Forecasts, 2020-2024".

https://www.technavio.com/report/welding-equipment-market-industry-analysis

The market is driven by the emergence of friction stir welding technology in automotive sector. In addition, the emergence of laser welding equipment is anticipated to boost the growth of the welding equipment market.

The friction stir welding technology is gaining popularity in the automotive industry as it carries out whole process under low operating temperature to prevent mechanical distortion. The products that are manufactured using this technology possess high integrity and are defect-free. This process has varied advantages such as improved mechanical properties, low operating cost, and ability to handle variations in the production process. The use of this technology helps in minimizing the overall weight of the automotive and consumes less power in comparison to welding processes. Thus, the emergence of friction stir welding technology in automotive sector is expected to drive market growth during the forecast period.

Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free.

View market snapshot before purchasing

Major Five Welding Equipment Market Companies:

ACRO Automation Systems Inc.

ACRO Automation Systems Inc. operates the business under various segments such as Services, Solutions, and Spare and replacement parts. The company offers Automated Welding Solutions. The company also provides retool and rebuild services, quality assurance process services, customer service and training services, and more.

AMADA HOLDINGS Co. Ltd.

AMADA HOLDINGS Co. Ltd. offers products through the following business units: Metalworking Machinery business and Metal Machine Tools business. The company offers laser welding equipment and resistance spot welding. The company also provides punch presses, press brakes, and laser machines.

Banner Welding Inc.

Banner Welding Inc. operates under various business segments, namely Automation, Standard Resistance Welders Product Line, and Contract manufacturing. The company offers welding equipment such as longitudinal type seam welder, press type roller ram welder, coil joining welder, frame welder, and more.

Colfax Corp.

Colfax Corp. offers products through the following business segments: Air and Gas Handling and Fabrication Technology. The company offers welding equipment under the brand name ESAB. The company also supplies industrial centrifugal and axial fans, ventilation control systems and software, gas compressors, and more.

Fronius International GmbH

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Fronius International GmbH offers products through the following business segments: PERFECT WELDING, SOLAR ENERGY, and PERFECT CHARGING. Through the PERFECT WELDING, the company offers a wide range of manual and robotic welding equipment. The company also provides automation services, manual welding equipment, and more.

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Welding Equipment Market End-user Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2024)

Welding Equipment Market Geographic Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2024)

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report, such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more. Request a free sample report

Related Reports on Industrials Include:

Ultrasonic Metal Welding Equipment Market Global Ultrasonic Metal Welding Equipment Market by geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America) and application (mobility, electrical and electronics, and alternate energy).

Arc Welding Robots Market Global Arc Welding Robots Market by geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America) and product (consumable method and non-consumable method).

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavios report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavios comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200305005298/en/

Contacts

Technavio ResearchJesse MaidaMedia & Marketing ExecutiveUS: +1 844 364 1100UK: +44 203 893 3200Email: media@technavio.com Website: https://www.technavio.com

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Global Welding Equipment Market 2020-2024 | Evolving Opportunities with ACRO Automation Systems Inc. and AMADA HOLDINGS Co. Ltd. | Technavio - Yahoo...

Ever play music or talk to Siri on your HomePod only to be blown away by the volume, and not in a good way? Me too, but theres an automation that can help.

HomePod has two characteristics that make this automation useful for me.

First, Apples smart speaker has a remarkably long memory of what it played last and how loud it played. Tap the top of the HomePod after a week without use and it will blast you with the last played track.

That tap behavior is the other thing. You can disable Hey Siri voice control, but you cant set a HomePod to ignore touch input. This can result in unexpected loud music when you bump the top dusting or when your toddler learns what that button does.

New features added in iOS 13 introduce a useful workaround. You still cant set your HomePod to ignore touch input, but you can automate how loud it plays.

A similar feature supported by Amazon Echo smart speakers motivated me to find the same behavior for HomePods.

Apples Home app lets you automatically set AirPlay 2 speaker volumes at specific levels based on triggers like time or location.

Each night at midnight, the volume on my HomePod resets to 30% so its not too loud (or too quiet) the next time I use it.

You can choose your own schedule and volume.

Start by creating an automation in the Home appon iOS 13 or macOS Catalina for when a time of day occurs.

Choose your time and schedule, then proceed to select AirPlay 2 speakers in your Home app. Finally, look for the Media section and click Audio, then select Adjust Volume Only and set your custom volume on the slider.

Save your automation, then enjoy the quality of life improvement from your HomePod and other AirPlay 2 speakers consistently starting each day with a reasonable volume. Know someone else with HomePods? Share this tip to teach them how to automate HomePod volume too!

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HomePod volume blasting you away? Try this volume automation - 9to5Mac

Lease abstraction is one of the biggest administrative burdens in retail leasing. The manual processing of entering key data points from leases is a pain point for any company managing a significant number of leases. So the team at LeaseInfo has created the perfect solution with automation.Its been in the market for more than a year and some early adopters have taken advantage of the new technology.

Accurait, is a cloud-based platform revolutionising the automation of lease abstraction. It converts a normal PDF lease into structured and meaningful insights by creating a data repository for portfolio management, lease audit, analysis and financial standards compliance.

Accurait was created by LeaseInfo, the largest retail leasing data provider in Australia. They understand the burden lease abstraction can have on a business, having spent the past 15 years extracting key data from thousands of lease contracts each year.

Along with CSIROs Data61, one of the worlds most respected data research agencies, the challenge of creating Accurait was coming up with a digitisation and extraction solution that could cater for the large range of contracts in Australia that differ in their structural complexity from overseas. This is why international software cant be used straight out of the box here in Australia.

Accurait uses Artificial Intelligenceto scan through each lease and extract the information needed such as the base rent, rent increases and key dates. It uses a suite of machine learning technologies to allow the system to continually learn with each contract the system sees. This means Accurait will only become more and more powerful over time.

Put simply, Accurait works by feeding a lease contract into the cloud-based, secure system, then in just a few seconds Accurait will show you an extraction of key data points for you to quickly audit and approve. It is then exportable to Excel, CSV or to a portfolio management system, like LeaseInfos My Portfolio.

Lease abstraction isnt the only thing Accurait can do. Built in are features like Advance Search, allowing you to search your entire portfolio for key clauses; bulk upload lets you load multiple leases at once; document search which gives you the ability to tag entire clauses throughout all your leases; calendar reminders of important dates; estimate rent and marketing levy; and document compare which gives you the ability to compare two similar documents to check for changes.

Accurait is currently being used by landlords, retailers, government agencies and organisations with large portfolios of leases. All are claiming to have improved efficiency and saved thousands of dollars in processing errors.

One early adopter of Accurait, Swarovski say they save 2,000 hours over the life of a lease contract, because they dont have to spend the usual six hours to reread the contract each time it needs to be consulted. All key data and clauses are captured and cataloged in Accurait for the life of the lease and beyond.

Swarovski say, We anticipate Accurait could save us in excess of $100,000 per year in terms of increased productivity, reduction in additional labour, legal and accounting costs and savings in rent from processing errors.

Michael Miller, Director NSW Small Business Commission says Accurait is an innovative tool that will help us to quickly deliver insights into our landlord and tenant clients and thereby deliver how we may better serve their needs.

CEO and Co-Founder of Panthera Property Group says Panthera Group have been an early adaptor of Accurait. It created efficiencies in our Retail Asset Management Platform. We use Accurait for due diligence of other shopping centres to check passing rent, produce future cashflow reports and diarise critical dates. It is a part of our ongoing strategy to be a market leader in the adaptation of technology for the shopping centre industry.

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Accurait is revolutionising the automation of lease abstraction - Belinda Daly

DUBLIN, March 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Automated Material Handling (AMH) Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2020 - 2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

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In 2019, the automated material handling market was valued at USD 6.42 billion and is expected to reach a value of USD 10.96 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of about 11.3%, over the forecast period 2020-2025.

The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, which has been conducted under the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, has established that workplace injuries have decreased by 25% in 10 years, due to the advent of various technologies in the workplace. This helps in boosting the automated material handling market.

Key Highlights

Major Market Trends

Airport Developments to Significantly Drive the Market Growth

Asia-Pacific to Witness the Fastest Growth

Competitive Landscape

The automated material handling market is fragmented and highly competitive in nature. Some of the major players are Daifuku Co, BEUMER Group, Siemens, JBT Corporation, Honeywell Intelligrated amongst others. Product launches, high expense on research and development, partnerships and acquisitions, etc. are the prime growth strategies adopted by these companies to sustain the intense competition.

Some of the recent developments are:

Key Topics Covered

1. INTRODUCTION1.1 Study Assumptions and Market Definition1.2 Scope of the Study

2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

4. MARKET INSIGHTS4.1 Market Overview4.2 Industry Value Chain Analysis4.3 Industry Attractiveness - Porter's Five Forces Analysis4.3.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers4.3.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers4.3.3 Threat of New Entrants4.3.4 Intensity of Competitive Rivalry4.3.5 Threat of Substitutes

5. MARKET DYNAMICS5.1 Market Drivers5.1.1 Increasing Technological Advancements Aiding Market Growth5.1.2 Industry 4.0 Investments Driving the Demand for Automation and Material Handling5.1.3 Rapid Growth of E-Commerce5.2 Market Restraints5.2.1 High Initial Costs5.2.2 Unavailability for Skilled Workforce

6. SEGMENTATION - BY PRODUCT TYPE6.1 Hardware6.2 Software6.3 Services

7. SEGMENTATION - BY EQUIPMENT TYPE7.1 Mobile Robots7.1.1 Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV)7.1.1.1 Automated Forklift7.1.1.2 Automated Tow/Tractor/Tug7.1.1.3 Unit Load7.1.1.4 Assembly Line7.1.1.5 Special Purpose7.1.2 Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR)7.1.3 Laser Guided Vehicle7.2 Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS)7.2.1 Fixed Aisle (Stacker Crane + Shuttle System)7.2.2 Carousel (Horizontal Carousel +Vertical Carousel)7.2.3 Vertical Lift Module7.3 Automated Conveyor7.3.1 Belt7.3.2 Roller7.3.3 Pallet7.3.4 Overhead7.4 Palletizer7.4.1 Conventional (High Level + Low Level)7.4.2 Robotic7.5 Sortation System

8. SEGMENTATION - BY REGION8.1 North America8.2 Europe8.3 Asia-Pacific8.4 Latin America8.5 Middle East & Africa

9. KEY VENDOR PROFILES9.1 Daifuku Co. Ltd.9.2 Kardex Group9.3 KION Group9.4 JBT Corporation9.5 Jungheinrich AG9.6 TGW Logistics Group GmbH9.7 SSI Schaefer AG9.8 KNAPP AG9.9 Mecalux S.A.9.10 System Logistics9.11 Viastore Systems GmbH9.12 BEUMER Group GmbH & Co. KG9.13 Interroll Group9.14 WITRON Logistik9.15 Dearborn Mid-West Company9.16 KUKA AG9.17 Honeywell Intelligrated9.18 Murata Machinery Ltd.9.19 Toyota Industries Corporation

10. INVESTMENT ANALYSIS

11. FUTURE OF THE MARKET

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Automated Material Handling (AMH) Market, Forecast to 2025 - Daifuku, BEUMER Group, Siemens, JBT, and Honeywell Intelligrated are Dominating - Yahoo...

International Data Corporation (IDC) the premier global market intelligence firm, predicts that between 2018 and 2021, companies worldwide will have collectively spent nearly $6trn on digital transformation initiatives. And, according to Krishnan Ramanujam, president of business and technology services for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global IT services, consulting, and business solutions organisation: CFOs, along with their counterparts in strategy and technology, can play a major role in determining which models may be economically viable for their firms, now and in the future.

CFOs will have numerous sizable internal funding requests fall on their desks and they cant be blamed for playing the devils advocate since they argue to help determine the validity of any digital transformation project. But their primary role as a digital CFO will be transforming their own department.

According to AccenturesFinance 2020report, automation will eliminate up to 40 percent of the transactional accounting work the finance department does today.Terry Walby, founder of Thoughtonomy, a software company with multi-award winning automation technology platform, reiterates the CFOs critical approach: As the project sponsor, the CFO needs to be comfortable building a business case, willing to take input from other departments and to spend the time to fully understand processes at a granular level.

A study undertaken by Compleat How tech is changing the role of finance, found that 51 percent of workers within UK businesses have rushed to implement new financial technology in the past couple of years, citing the UK Governments Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative as a key driver.

Researchers at Gartner conducted interviews with 150+ corporate controllers, chief accounting officers, and chief accounting leaders to study about the benefits automation could pose for businesses. One of the highlights from the study was that the average amount of avoidable rework in accounting departments can take up to 30 percent of a full-time employees time. If fully implemented, automation can save upward of 25,000 hours per year and close to 675,000.

According to The dawn of a new partnership: A robotics-led finance function by EY, automating manual processes with little subjective judgment like data input and output, reconciliation, data quality management, reporting, and dashboard and business rules can reduce man-hours between 20 percent-80 percent.

The use of automation in finance can drive efficiencies by reducing human error. It helps in freeing up the finance team to refocus on more strategic work. By using automation, the finance function can accurately forecast, which means that the business can make more real-time decisions as opposed to just playing catch-up. The CFO can start to get more predictions from the accounting department and that can result in better business outcomes.

Back in 2018, Spanish football club RCD Espanyol automated its financial processes and according to their finance director Joan Fit: The finance team has become infinitely more flexible since making use of the automation features, with productivity going up by more than 20 percent, reporting time reduced by 50 percent and errors reduced by over 25 percent. The team can instead focus on using Club information, analysing it in real-time to become more strategic in its effort to become a globally-recognised name in the world of football.

Tim Leger, SVP business process automation and transformation at Sutherland Global Services said in an article on Financial Director: The future of digital finance is intelligent automation and RPA is yesterdays news. As organisations have embraced robotic process automation (RPA), it has become a single, commodity tool in the larger automation toolbox no longer at the centre of transformation and synonymous with process automation.

It is difficult to associate a cost in terms of price for finance function automation. It depends on the kind of project, the scale of it, size of the company and several other factors. Understanding and explaining the actual costs associated with deploying finance automation are tough since they are quite different from an industrial robot.

According to a blog on DocuPhase, business automation tools can start at 23 a month for 0-10 employees, and rise from there. Typically, automation in the finance function starts from accounting tasks. This article in Accountancy Age gives a good idea of the pricing of the best online accounting software in the UK. Business analysis tools, such as ActiveOps, StereoLOGIC or Celonis compare the short-term costs of using automation over the next two to five years versus a finance software tool.

However, the real cost of automation in the finance function is beyond the project implementation cost and the price of the software or the technology. Here are considerations that CFOs must make while deciding on implementing automation projects.

As in accounting terms, make or buy analysis needs to be conducted to check the feasibility of both making an automation software in-housing or buying/getting it developed from external providers. The analysis will help in highlighting the costs and benefits associated with either of the decision.

The success of the automation initiative depends on its integration with existing business applications and hardware.

Keeping business continuity in mind, the implementation of the automation project needs to consider the current and the proposed architecture, hardware and IT infrastructure on priority. Over dependencies on the current set up can create an outage that can have a significant business impact post-implementation.

While its easy to get caught up focusing on the commercial rationale, the success of the automation project depends on the willingness and participation of the staff involved not just in its implementation, but also in using it.

Another outcome of automation, which might be a potential notional cost at least for the CFOs, is the perceived threat of machine taking over humans. CFOs, as leaders of the finance function, need to keep viable streams ready to deploy the members of the team whose tasks have been cut short. Automation will inevitably lead to changes in organisational structures and redefined roles, if not layoffs. Amazon recently said it would spend close to 540m ($700m) to retrain 100,000 employees to perform new jobs made possible by AI and robots.

CFOs could come up with plans like financial planning and analysis personnel getting deployed to support the business closely than before and tax specialists refocusing to maximize after-tax income for the business.

Automated processes require oversight to make sure they are operating properly. Hence monitoring is necessary to make sure that the process is being operated and yielding results as per its objectives. Automation software is like middleware in the sense that someone needs to support and maintain the programs on an ongoing basis.

The cost of upgrading the automation software must be considered specifically, for regression testing and possibly re-implementing required to take advantage of new features or changes in features.

Automation, once up and running can appear magical. But, just like the magic shows seen on stage, theres more to it than what meets the eye. Automation software are typically rule-based systems that need creating rules, basically if statements, that are fed and followed.

It is vital to accept that automation cant handle irregular or highly complex processes, make decisions, fix broken processes, self-correct, and thus cant replace the human team. When businesses attribute the abilities of automation to magic, the spell can soon break down.

Andrew Spanyi, the author of four books on process management, says: RPA does not redesign anything. It doesnt ask whether we need to do this activity at all. It operates at the task level and not the end-to-end process level.

The adoption of emerging technologies like automation in the finance function during the next decade is going to change the role of the CFO. As per Accentures estimates based on insights from market analysis, cross-functional integrated teams will deliver 80 percent of traditional finance services.

As a business case to CFOs, automation contributes to both, the top as well the bottom line by not only replacing time-intensive, low-value and backward-looking accounting tasks but also enabling finance teams to spend more of their time on high-value, forward-looking business building and in-turn making them companys most important competitive advantages.

By saying yes to automation, CFOs can position the finance function as a strategic partner and in turn secure their own positions on the board and get closer to the CEO. But they deserve to be provided with a strong business case.

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Cost of automation for the cynical CFO - Financial Director

Automation has become the new buzzword for the world today, doling out hope to millions across the world that many mundane tasks can be done through machines or algorithms.

In such a scenario, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven startup, AntWorks, wants to redefine the world of automation where there is a definite business outcome. That is not all. It also passes the ethics test.

AntWorks, the Singapore-headquartered AI startup in the space of robotic process automation (RPA), was founded by Asheesh Mehra and Govind Sandhu in 2015. With over three-fourth of its employees based out of India, AntWorks believes its time has come. Time to showcase to the world the technology prowess it has built and which is aligned with the needs of business.

Asheesh and Govind come with long experience of working with business process management (BPM), popularly known as the BPO industry. They had early interaction with RPA but felt there were many gaps which were unaddressed.

Asheesh Mehra, co-founder & Group CEO, AntWorks Group

For the first three years, AntWorks was working on a parallel mode where, on the one hand, it was engaged with clients to provide automation services, and on the other, it was building its own technology engine.

According to Asheesh, the biggest challenge that all the RPA companies were facing was that they were coming out with automation solutions without tackling the fundamental issue of how to deal with data.

The existing technology framework which was used to read various patterns of data was optical character recognition (OCR) but it had its own limitations as it could not go through complex maze of information. Enterprises generally have 85 percent of information passing through them which is unstructured.

The co-founder of AntWorks also claims that if one talks to 100 RPA users, it boils down to a situation where 95 percent of them have not seen any of their business cases being solved.

Having built this data engine based on fractal science, AntWorks was able to create a pattern recognition whereby enterprises and business could more accurately automate their tasks and have the desired outcome.

Towards this end, AntWorks created its own technology platform which does the task of RPA while giving the flexibility to the customers on how they would like to use it.

To use our platform, one does not have to be a data scientist or need any specialised coding skills. We have a drag-and-drop environment to create the bots for automation tasks, says Asheesh.

The platform built by AntWorks is for consumption of business analysts. We have created an integrated automation platform where it can solve business cases of our customers, says Asheesh.

It was also observed in the RPA industry that a vast majority of the projects have not scaled beyond a point and AntWorks spent a lot of time in 2019 to educate the marketplace about its platform. It also impressed upon the various global analyst bodies on the skills it possesses.

Currently, AntWorks clientele is broad-based and spread across various geographies like North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. In India, five of the top 10 banks are engaged with it.

Though AntWorks has dominant focus on the various segments of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry, it has got its presence in other areas such as retail, healthcare, telco, and advertising, as well.

This is because it not only provides multiple positive outcomes such as increased productivity, lower costs, and competitive edge, but also frees up the time of the enterprises who can actively look at other market opportunities. All this is being done at a high speed because AntWorks is able to process the data faster to feed its automation engine.

However, Asheesh admits that they have had multiple failures and successes which have kept them grounded and helped them in having an open mind to learning new things.

AntWorks is very clear on how its technology platform is used as it believes that AI should be delivered for good results. AI can be used for malicious purpose, so we go through very stringent deal qualification process with our clients, says Asheesh. Our technology is 100 percent transparent, auditable and everything can be traced back, he remarks.

AntWorks currently has over 650 people with around 430 based at its three centres in India Bengaluru, Chennai, and Mumbai. Besides, it has offices across the globe.

This startup first raised its series A round of funding of $15 million (Rs 105 crore approx) in 2018 from SBI Holdings, Japan. It plans to go for its second round during the course of this year.

Though bootstrapped in its initial years, AntWorks generated enough revenue which provided the resources to reinvest in its business. AntWorks is confident of recording a growth rate in the range of 300-400 percent for FY20, as the fundamental blocks are in place. It also aims to be profitable by 2022.

The co-founder of AntWorks believes in taking everybody along as part of their growth journey as, he says, the startup provides employee stock option even to the lowest level of its employees.

Nobody tells you how hard entrepreneurial journey is as one has to make a lot of sacrifices. It is like going through a sauna, sweating day and night. Outcome has been great for us, says Asheesh.

(Edited by Javed Gaihlot)

Read the rest here:

AntWorks wants to reimagine the fundamentals of robotic process automation - YourStory

The jobs of the future are highly technology intensive and the combined effort of governments and international organisations must pick up pace to upgrade workers skills, according to one economic research analyst at analytics firm GlobalData.

Kausani Basak, analyst at Global Data says up-skilling workforces is crucial to arrest job losses due to automation across the ASEAN region.

If left unchecked, it has the potential to create severe macroeconomic imbalances, creating both supply and demand chain disruptions, says Baska.

In the high growth ASEAN countries - Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam - more than 50% jobs are vulnerable due to automation in the long run, and as a result, up-skilling the workforce becomes a pre-requisite for strong, sustained and balanced growth of the economy.

GlobalData says the traditional educational and training institutes are yet to adopt according to the changing times, leading to a huge skill mismatch in these countries, and consequently, the structural unemployment in countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam has been rising.

The labor market in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam are already facing heat from high unemployment among people with basic education, says Basak.

On the other hand, these countries also have a huge working age population, thus further adding to the issues.

GlobalData says hotels and restaurants, wholesale and retail trade and construction and manufacturing are the sectors which are particularly staring at the risk of job losses due to automation.

More specifically, hundreds of thousands of sowing machine operators in Cambodias garment manufacturing, millions of shop sales assistants and office clerks in Thailand and Indonesia, respectively, are expected to experience high volume of job losses, Global Data says.

According to GlobalData, the emerging new occupations that are replacing the old ones require up-graded skills that will deepen their competencies and enhance career prospects.

GlobalData says that in the recent years, there has been a rising concern among the governments to reduce the skills mismatch and as a result they have taken some preliminary steps towards increasing the technological education penetration and re-designing the existing curriculum.

Countries such as Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia have been substantially emphasising on the skill development of workers. However, these measures are not providing enough support so as to integrate the workers into the labor force seamlessly.

Nevertheless, positive re-enforcements have started appearing in the region as multinational employers are driving the up-skilling and training initiatives. In November 2018, the World Economic Forum along with top tech companies pledged to develop technological skills for the employees of the ASEAN countries by 2020 through ASEAN Digital Skills Vision 2020.

As of August 2019, more than US$4.4m was raised for providing scholarships to tech students and about 9 million SME workers were trained across the ASEAN.

In March 2019, JP Morgan announced plans to invest US$350m for a period of five years worldwide to up-skill employees. In October 2019, Microsoft announced partnership with Grab and universities in South East Asia to facilitate industry relevant technological learning through hackathons and internships, GlobalData concludes.

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Read more from the original source:

Need to upgrade worker skills to cope with automation, tech intensive jobs of future, says analyst - iTWire