Published
- 01:00 am
Ther was the time when everyone was saying "the future of shopping is online"? It seems like that future is now and the current reality is that shopping in bricks and mortars retail stores is a less essential part in the seller-buyer experience. Digital shopping, particularly for retail consumers, has not only reshaped the payments industry, but has also left an indelible effect on how products are presented, displayed, compared, purchased, and eventually delivered. The traditional definition of shelf space and product face has been replaced with an overarching priority to showcase practical and functional utilities, alongside the focus on convenience of shipment and handling.
Answering the expectations of modern-age retailers, shippers and consumers, Dow Packaging & Specialty Plastics (P&SP) offers a new age ultra-efficient packing solution made from a blend of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) that delivers both convenience and quality. In markets like Asia where digital retail sales are growing faster than anywhere else in the world, packaging is an increasingly critical component of the total proposition. This innovative enhanced expanded polyethylene (EPE) foam solution from Dow offers better protection from stress - with its flexibility and firmness, and delivers greater value - through its prolific cost-efficiency.
Rise of e-commerce leading to a vibrant logistics industry
In emerging economies like India and Indonesia, the digital retailing sector experienced stellar growth rates of 129.5% and 65.6%, respectively in 2015. While China, another fast-growing market for online shopping, accounts for 40% of the world's retail e-commerce sales. Similarly, the economies of other Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore also offer an amazing level of potential for retailers who can leverage the digital opportunity. One doesn't need to go farther than the nearest metropolis to understand how a rising middle class and a culture of consumerism are fueling the growth of online shopping. From tech-gadgets to household articles to fashion - online shopping platforms like Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart are discovering effective ways to deliver goods to people's doorsteps.
Most importantly, smartphones have made it even easier for people to search, compare, and order things from anywhere and anytime. When your favorite marketplace is at your fingertips, you are likely to have more choices and expected to seek more flexibility. And this notion of flexibility extends beyond the physical product itself. From packaging to shipment to delivery, today's consumers look for a seamless and positive experience that ultimately contributes to maintaining the integrity of the brand.
Needless to say, the shipment and logistics aspects play a decisive, often underestimated role in delivering a positive customer experience - maintaining the integrity of the brand's image. Where Dow's revolutionary EPE solution adds real value is in durability, convenience and safety of the shipped package. Sellers would want the packaging to not only withstand automated and manual processing especially when in transit, but also leave a hassle-free impression in the consumer's mind when the product reaches its destination. The bottom-line: the best customer experience ensured by safely delivering the product in the most efficient packaging.
A dynamic industry where one size doesn't fit all
Contrary to traditional shelf packaging, which involves a large number of identical or similar products, e-commerce logistics deals with products of different types, shapes and sizes that are packed together and transported to the same or neighboring destinations. The co-location of products of many different types and shapes makes it essential to use suitable packaging that would protect the goods from shocks and hazards during transportation, and from each other too. The primary (exterior) packaging of an e-commerce shipment - which could be a corrugated box, courier bag, tube, padded envelope or carton - doesn't suffice; so, a secondary or sometimes tertiary packaging is commonly applied to wrap and protect the products. Materials traditionally used for this include enhanced expanded polyethylene (EPE), air bubble films, inflatable air, and cushion bags.
EPE, lovingly called pearl cotton, is one of the most popular types of protective packaging that is durable and flexible at the same time. This material can be shaped and tailored into various forms, such as rolls, mesh and planks, making it suitable for various usage types. It is typically an unfailing material that protects a wide variety of goods - from small electronic components and food items to large machinery and home appliances.
A revolutionary solution from a global leader
Dow is not only a global leader in packaging materials, it is also a pioneer in supporting the e-commerce sector. Staying true to its tradition of industry engagement and continuous innovation, Dow keeps a constant track of developments in the logistics and packaging sectors. Here in Asia, based on intensive research and development, the company has developed a range of flexible packaging solutions to meet the needs of the vibrant e-commerce market in this region. Dow's innovative EPE technology is the perfect example of a practical solution from a global leader who has deep understanding of the market and the customers.
DOWTM LDPE 450E and ELITETM LLDPE blend can deliver a 20% greater strength and almost twice the tear strength vs. standard EPE resin. These LDPE/LLDPE blends are better able to protect e-commerce goods by minimizing damage risks during shipping and handling. As a result of its cost-efficient performance and reliability, smart businesses are choosing this solution over conventional options available in the market.
Dow's EPE solution brings functional benefits coupled with superior performance
The foaming in traditional EPE solutions uses 100% LDPE, making the material too brittle, damage-prone and more susceptible to in-transit wear and tear. Dow's patented technology for enhanced EPE goes to the heart of these issues and offers a reliable fix by blending LDPE with LLDPE which has higher tear strength than 100% LDPE.
Dow's EPE technologies can be adopted across a wide range of applications. This innovative solution is compatible to pack many consumer goods types that were previously unsuitable for EPE packaging due to poor compression and tear strength. Sharp or edgy objects, thorny fruits like Durian, and heavy items such as appliances can now be safely packed and wrapped using Dow's LDPE solution.
A key advantage of this advanced EPE solution is its superior cushioning delivered through higher compression ability. It requires less secondary and tertiary packaging, reducing costs and weight, streamlining packing operations. Foamed EPE sheets using Dow's advanced technology enable merchants to reduce the number of layers needed, for instance, from five-six to three-four without affecting the packaging integrity. Apart from savings on space, it also cuts down material and transportation costs, and benefits the environment by lowering energy consumption and reducing the amount of packaging diverted to landfills.
Comprehensive Polyethylene (PE) Packaging
Dow offers a full suite of PE products for e-commerce packaging. In particular, its DOWTM LDPE, DOWLEXTM, and ELITETM resins can be formulated into bubble films, air cushion bags, and heat sealing and binding materials that can be used to produce air column bags. Dow also collaborates with e-commerce logistics value chain partners to improve the comprehensive performance of related products and technologies. The company's LDPE/LLDPE blends make packaging lighter, often leaner, and improves shipping economics.
By delivering innovative packaging solutions, such as enhanced EPE, Dow is enabling e-commerce merchants to optimize logistics and minimize damage to products during shipment. Avoiding excessive packaging, and the need for less storage space, also means eliminating wastage of resources and ensuring a positive customer experience.
In fact, this innovation from Dow can potentially benefit e-commerce businesses and customers across Asia, by customizing the solution according to respective market and sector needs, and contribute to an overall improvement in industry efficiency and sustainability.
- 04:00 am
Today Profile Software, an international financial solutions vendor, revealed that Abu Dhabi National Insurance Company (ADNIC) in the UAE, one of the leading regional multi-line insurance providers for corporates and individuals, is using the IMSplus Insurance Investment Management solution to achieve operational efficiency of its investment management operations.
Following ADNIC’s vendor selection process, Profile Software was appointed as the vendor of choice. With highly flexible and functionality-rich features, IMSplus is Profile Software’s leading investment management platform that is being used by many international insurance firms, across multiple locations. It offers an easily customizable solution that caters to current and future business needs. The platform enables users to comply with local and international markets, automate processes and efficiently manage back office investment management operations.
IMSplus offers a wealth of benefits to ADNIC through flexible and multi-level analysis features. ADNIC uses IMSplus to monitor sector and asset class exposures of its invested assets. The system’s reporting capabilities allow investment managers to perform comprehensive analyses of the company’s invested assets (cash, fixed term deposits, equities, bonds, funds, private equity and real estate) and performance. ADNIC also benefits from the quality and timely production of reports (for regulatory and management purposes) as well as the overall process automation, while reducing costs, increasing productivity and achieving greater efficiency across operations.
ADNIC’s selection of IMSplus expands Profile Software’s Insurance client portfolio and reaffirms its expertise in delivering competitive investment management solutions to the insurance industry. IMSplus is used by a range of regional and international insurance firms, offering integrated services and contributing to their operational excellence
- 05:00 am
Today Coupa Software, a leading provider of cloud-based spend management solutions, announced that major international oil and gas company, KMG Rompetrol, has selected Coupa to automate its procurement processes and increase efficiency across its operations.
Operating in a highly competitive global industry and with an expanding supplier and customer base, KMG Rompetrol required an agile solution that would not only allow its internal procurement activities to be automated, but also add value by providing insight into measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).
After a stringent evaluation of the marketplace, KMG Rompetrol chose Coupa’s S2P and analytics software, highlighting the mobility of the Coupa solution and intuitive user interface of the platform as important advantages.
“Coupa stood out to us immediately. Our suppliers are a vital part of our business and the fact that Coupa doesn’t charge them for collaboration on the platform was a key differentiator,” said Zamanbek Mirzayanov, global procurement director at KMG Rompetrol. “We wanted a solution that would allow us to streamline our procurement process completely, foster collaboration and allow us to focus our efforts on the more mission critical aspects of our business. It became clear very quickly why Coupa is recognised as an innovator and leader in the spend management space.”
In addition to KMG Rompetrol automating its financial processes with Coupa solutions, the oil and gas company also can provide employees with access to supplier information in even the most remote locations.
Headquartered in Bucharest, Romania, and a subsidiary of KazMunayGas, the state-owned oil and gas company of Kazakhstan, KMG Rompetrol is one of the most well-established oil companies in Europe. It has more than 7,000 employees in 12 countries with significant operations in the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea.
Coupa EMEA General Manager Alex Kleiner emphasised that by selecting Coupa, KMG Rompetrol can make it easier for its employees to transact and collaborate with suppliers, laying the foundations for long-lasting successful relationships.
“In a fast-moving competitive industry, it’s absolutely crucial for organisations to have the correct technology in place allowing them to automate their procurement processes as efficiently as possible,” Kleiner said. “At Coupa, we understand the importance of measuring KPIs and ensure that our solutions are optimised to provide insight into business spend, all of which helps deliver clear and measurable value. KMG Rompetrol, is one of the most recognised oil and gas organisations in the world, and we’re excited to have them join the Coupa family.”
- 01:00 am
Synechron Inc., a world's leading financial services consulting and technology services provider, has today announced the launch of “Neo,” a set of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions for the financial services industry. Neo uniquely brings together Synechron’s digital, business and technology consulting to allow financial institutions to deploy cutting-edge, AI solutions that solve complex business challenges.
Synechron has built 14 reusable applications – Accelerators – that allow financial institutions to reduce time-to-market when applying AI to enhance business operations, reduce operating costs, and create better client experiences. Synechron’s AI Accelerators applications have taken a business challenge that can be best solved through AI and re-architected business processes to build a solution powered by artificial intelligence and optimized for user experience. The Accelerators use techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Cognitive Machine Learning, Data Science, and Robo-Advisors to address a range of use cases. In addition to custom development work, Synechron has partnered with specialist FinTech firms such as Quantexa, Yseop and SQREEM.
Financial institutions are looking to implement the latest technology to address real-world problems in financial services. Neo and Synechron’s AI Accelerators will be pivotal in helping clients be at the forefront of technological advancement, while providing a comprehensive set of tools to ease and streamline processes. This will allow businesses to deploy technology-enabled processes that augment the role of individuals, allowing them to be elevated to higher-value business tasks.
The AI Accelerators apply some of the most advanced AI and Deep Learning techniques, and algorithms including Google Tesseract’s OCR and binarization, the NLTK platform for sentiment analysis, SARIMA for time-series data, Self-Org Maps for clustering, Deep Learning Recurring Neural Networks (RNN) for dynamic classification, Support Vector Machines for classification, R for statistical modeling and reinforced learning, multi-level Perception for classification, and Apache Spark for big data and machine learning. They also draw on deep financial services expertise, and foundational programming languages and tools including OpenNLP, R, Python, Jflex, PDFBox, MS LUIS, Tessaract, Spark, Apache Solr and mongoDB, among others.
The AI engine, business and technical analysis at the core of these accelerators can be applied to additional use cases to progress more quickly with similar initiatives. Along with the use of the AI applications, the Accelerator Program offers access to Synechron’s team of consultants, technologists and digital teams who are experts in financial services business processes, products, regulation, operating models and data architectures which are critical to constructing affective AI applications.
- 09:00 am
TiVo Corporation is a world's leader in entertainment technology and audience insights. Today the company announced that TiVo and Sky, Europe’s leading entertainment company, has joined forces to deliver voice search for Sky’s next-generation box, Sky Q. TiVo is providing Sky Q with a natural language, voice-based search solution, making it quicker and easier for Sky Q customers to find the content they are looking for.
The solution delivered by TiVo lets consumers use their voice to search for digital entertainment across linear TV and video on demand (VOD). By implementing Conversation Services on Sky Q, Sky is making it easier for customers to discover entertainment, sport and movies by providing a conversational experience through language recognition and naturally spoken responses.
“With Sky Q, we continue to innovate and bring fantastic new features to our customers, who we know are watching more TV than ever before. We want to make it even faster and easier for them to search, discover and watch TV,” said Luke Bradley-Jones, Sky’s brand director of TV and content products. “That’s why we’ve introduced voice search. With the technology delivered by TiVo, we are enabling our customers to use natural, voice-based queries to find new and favourite TV to enjoy.”
The solution is built on TiVo’s knowledge graph engine, a dynamic knowledge base of entertainment metadata, capable of understanding trends and conversations. Updated continuously via data ingestion and news crawlers, the knowledge graph includes information produced and curated by hundreds of content editors, predictive search results, and behavioral indicators from social networks.
“With more and more content choices and a great range of entertainment available across TV, TiVo is helping partners like Sky provide the best user experience whilst driving content consumption,” said Matt Berry, senior vice president and general manager, advanced search and recommendations, TiVo. “We are pleased to extend our long-standing relationship with Sky. This implementation further reinforces the value of TiVo’s product portfolio in bringing the latest capabilities to pay-TV homes across Europe.”
- 09:00 am
Spanish banking group BBVA is contributing information on card transactions to a United Nations project trying to tap big data to combat climate change.
The UN Global Pulse Data for Climate Action open-innovation project is inviting data experts and researchers from around the world to pitch their ideas on how they can use information from private sector partners in the fight against climate change.
BBVA is among the firms backing the project, providing statistical data on transactions with its debit and credit cards in Spanish stores between 2014 and 2016, available through the bank's API Market.
Researchers picked by the UN will have four months to work on how they can use the data from BBVA, and others such as telco Orange and traffic app Waze, to further efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
"Driving effective action on climate change requires not only climate data, but also rich information about human behavior," says Robert Kirkpatrick, director of UN Global Pulse.
"Big data can provide dynamic feedback on how communities affect and are affected by the climate system, and enable innovation to increase sustainability and resilience. This data is primarily held by companies, like those participating in Data for Climate Action."
After the four months are up, a panel of climate change and data analysis experts will look at the methodology, relevance and potential impact of the projects before picking winners who will see their efforts brought into the real world.
- 02:00 am
Bittium exhibits its innovative products and mobile security solutions at the British APCO exhibition to be held in Telford, United Kingdom, March 21 – 22. The event is directed at authorities and one of the main themes of the event is UK’s transition starting in the year 2018 from TETRA-based call and messaging applications to the Emergency Services Network (ESN), where LTE broadband solutions will be used for the communications of police, fire and ambulance services.
At the event Bittium will demonstrate the functionalities of the newly launched Confidential classification level version of Bittium Tough Mobile LTE smartphone together with the related Bittium Secure Suite device management and encryption software. Bittium will also showcase a selection of different special accessories and software solutions for Bittium Tough Mobile that have been designed for demanding police and military use cases.
Bittium Tough Mobile’s unique dual-boot functionality for the Confidential classification level makes it possible to operate the device with two completely separate operating systems: Public and Confidential. The operating system classified as Public is meant for personal communications and the operating system classified as Confidential is completely isolated and hardened for secure authority and information security use. Bittium Tough Mobile’s information security solutions are based on the close integration of the device’s unique hardware solutions together with Bittium Secure Suite secure software solution, therefore making Bittium Tough Mobile uniquely secure. The entity enables the user to have only one device for calls and messaging for both personal and for demanding information security needs, thus eliminating the need to carry two separate devices.
Bittium’s products and solutions are exhibited at stand D10. Bittium’s partner Getac is exhibiting on stand L1 rugged tablets that can be equipped with Bittium SafeMove® Mobile VPN and Analytics software. By equipping Getac’s products with Bittium’s software, the productivity, security and user experience of field workers operating in demanding conditions, can be improved.
- 03:00 am
Folksam and Tieto continue to develop their partnership with an outsourcing agreement under which Tieto takes over the responsibility for Folksam’s IT operations in Östersund, Sweden. The agreement includes that Folksam IT operations employees in Östersund will be offered employment within Tieto. This will further strengthen Tieto's position in the Swedish market and will add valuable expertise in application management and consulting services.
Tieto will be responsible for several IT-systems and provide consultancy services to Folksam. The cooperation strengthens Tieto's offerings in IT development for the insurance industry and expanding its presence in Östersund.
We are delighted to further enhance our cooperation with Folksam and look forward to welcoming new employees to our office in Östersund. This will strengthen Tieto with long-sought-after capabilities that will enable to further develop our offerings in both application services and consulting services, says Per Johanson, Executive Vice President, Financial Services, Tieto. With this agreement Folksam can continue to optimise and further develop its business, while the continuous services are secured by Tieto.
Our aim is to have the insurance and savings industry's most satisfied customers, which requires us to have efficient IT operations that evolve over time. We choose to outsource operations to a reliable company in the industry that is already established in Östersund. This will ensure that our employees get a reliable employer, says Gunnar Fröderberg, CIO, Folksam.
- 08:00 am
Booming demand for digital workforce management sees Gibbs Hybrid Workforce Solutions open up new office in Dublin. This expansion follows a year-on-year revenue increase of 19 per cent in 2016, as the minority-owned business hit £58million in total UK operations. Gibbs’ growth has repeatedly exceeded the industry average and completely outstrips Staffing Industry Analysts growth prediction of 6 per cent for the industry as a whole.
Gibbs’ decision to open up digital workforce operations in Dublin follows two significant client wins amongst the FTSE 100 last year. Outperforming larger competitors, Gibbs secured a huge twin contract with one of the world’s major technology giants. Gibbs’ are now their core supplier for IT and Business professionals across the UK, as well as their Vendor Neutral MSP, managing the technology supply chain. The combined deals are worth just under £28m.
The new office space highlight the next step in Gibbs growth strategy to expand their footprint, which aligns with their values to offer clients a dynamic and agile service. The Dublin office will gift their multinational clients with access to on-site client support to better deliver bespoke talent solutions.
A driving factor to Gibbs’ rapid growth has been a result of its innovative hybrid approach, which blends technology staffing solutions and project consultancy to global blue chips brands.
Farida Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs Hybrid Workforce Solutions comments: “It might be an age of remote working and connections around the globe, but we’ve made this move to Dublin because we still believe in being close to our customers. In the past we’ve opened up facilities in places like Northampton and Cheshire to provide talent services where they are most needed.
“Our growth so far has come from this commitment to maintaining client relationships, and as Dublin strengthens its status as a tech hub, we’re very excited to support our clients’ ongoing growth there.”
Farida continues: “Digital technology continues to drive industries forward and the strength of your talent pipeline is increasingly what keeps companies ahead. Clients are looking for a trusted partner to secure this pipeline from end-to-end, so we need to make sure we are with them every step of the way. It’s this people-centric service, care and attention given to both our contractors and clients, which is driving our growth as we strive to be the most respected digital workforce partner in the industry.”
Dean Curtis
UK Managing Director at LexisNexis
A lack of information sharing between organisations fighting financial crime has allowed such a severe scale of money laundering to take place. see more
