Insight

You offer your time, your money and your enthusiasm without question when choosing furniture for a new home. The same effort and energy should be on hand when decking out your new workplace, as office furniture needs to compliment your business, your brand and your budget. The design of any office is not only vital in encouraging teamwork and enhancing employee productivity and motivation, but also provides an immediate visual image of your company’s culture and philosophy to prospective clients and business partners. Your choice of furniture can have a huge impact on your business, from providing those key first impressions to increasing efficiency and earnings as well as helping maintain a happy workforce. That is a long list of important elements resting on your décor decisions.

Many businesses don’t utilise their office space to its full potential, and with a rise in real estate prices and increased mobile and home-working, employers are tying up capital with redundant, empty desks.   This year is all about making your workplace work for you, and the growing demand for space sharing and a flexible working environment is set to continue throughout 2017.  Do you enjoy your job? Is the big commute or the small salary taking its toll?  With 1 in 4 UK employees looking to leave their jobs, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, how can we make work more worthwhile? 

With rising rents in the major cities, it’s more important than ever to get the most out of your office, making the traditional workplace where space is under-utilised, ripe for reinvention.  Spaces offering a flexible, fresh way of working aren’t anything new, but with the banking industry now ditching the old-fashioned office protocol, it looks like this innovative style could take the working world by storm. Thin desks and virtual desktops, which can be accessed by any computers at any desk, help keep the office prosperous, popular and productive. 

UniCredit, one of the leading European commercial banks, and Anthemis Group, the leading financial services technology venture and advisory firm, today announced a new joint investment venture. UniCredit EVO (equity venture opportunities) will be a dedicated initiative focused exclusively on identifying and investing in best-in-class financial technology startups. With an initial capital commitment of €200 million from UniCredit, the initiative will target mid stage startups and follow-on investments in more mature and established FinTech businesses, as well as early stage digitally native financial services startups working on more pioneering solutions.

European businesses are seeing an explosion in the growth of information coming into their organisations, as well as an increase in the ways they access it. In fact, IDC predicts that the volume of data they receive will have increased six-fold over the past five years to 2015 and is set to continue at a similar rate. This presents a significant challenge for businesses in terms of making sense of the information accessed and delivering it in a cost-effective and time-efficient way.

IDC’s latest whitepaper: ‘Are your business processes stifling your market opportunity? Cost-efficient print and document management through smart MFPs’, identifies the need to get to grips with the exponential growth in access to information as being a key workplace trend that is driving many initiatives to improve business process efficiency.

 Emden is the third largest Germany North Sea port. It is a modern and highly productive universal facility that has evolved into one of Europe’s most significant roll-on/roll-off ports for new cars, and it plays a vital role in the emerging market for green energy, particularly wind energy. Components for both onshore and offshore facilities are manufactured, assembled and shipped in and out of Emden.  The port serves as a base for the pre-assembly, transport and maintenance of the facilities and equipment of multiple wind farms. Here, we interview, Lord Mayor of the City of Emden Mr. Bernd Bornemann, who explains the port’s significance.

More than a place, it’s a state of mind where ideas take control, where a collective approach is paramount; a place that creates the industrial intelligence of tomorrow.

If we were to choose 3 reasons for you to invest in Nantes-Saint-Nazaire we would pick:

1. A dynamic economy and a diversity of activities

Global industry leaders

Advanced manufacturing technologies

Foreign direct investment is a huge subject when viewed in the aggregate. Even when considering just portions of it – U.S. FDI, for example – it remains the large and lofty topic of international trade analysts, global statisticians, trade agreement negotiators and others involved in trillions of dollars and the economies of entire countries. That’s why governments deal with cross-border investment issues of this magnitude.

Maumelle, Arkansas is located in Central Arkansas and is part of the Little Rock MSA with all the advantages of the region plus the added bonus of being a smaller community with that “hometown” feeling. Maumelle is only minutes away from the state’s capital city, the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, and the Little Rock Port Authority/Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ #14). Midway between Mexico City and Montreal, Maumelle is centrally connected to both national and international markets by Interstates 30, 40, and 430.