Autor: venred

PHOENIX, Aug. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Universal Technical Institute, Inc. (NYSE: UTI) confirmed the expansion of its Welding Technology Training Program at both its Houston and Long Beach campuses. The company also announced its welding program is scheduled to launch at UTI-Lisle outside Chicago in early 2021. These three campuses join UTI campuses in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., Avondale, Ariz., and Dallas, Texas in offering the program, which was developed in partnership with global welding industry leader, Lincoln Electric (Nasdaq: LECO).

«Houston and Long Beach, rank first and third, respectively, among metro areas with the highest employment levels for welding,» said Sherrell Smith, Executive Vice President of Campus Operations. «Welding technicians have never been more vital to our nation’s economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the essential work these men and women do to support critical infrastructure projects. We expect welding to continue to be a high enrollment and employment growth area for UTI.»

UTI’s Houston welding program opened in May 2020 and the first class at the Long Beach campus is scheduled to begin on August 10. Enrollment in the welding program at UTI’s campuses continues to be strong. The company also expects robust student demand for the UTI-Lisle welding program and employer demand for its graduates in the metropolitan and suburban Chicago area, which is the nation’s fifth highest metropolitan area for welding employment. Overall, the UTI welding programs are expected to deliver over five percent of new student starts in fiscal 2020.

Even in the face of significant rates of unemployment across the nation, welders are sought after in industries ranging from automotive fabrication to energy and manufacturing and are particularly in demand for major infrastructure projects that include bridges, highways, office buildings, schools, pipelines, power plants, ports, refineries, and spacecraft. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be approximately 48,800 job openings annually for welders through 2028.¹

In response to the COVID-19 health crisis, UTI transitioned from solely in-person training to a blended learning model that combines online, instructor-delivered teaching and demonstrations with hands-on labs, in alignment with current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and local health authority guidelines.

For a full list of health and safety measures in UTI’s campus labs, please refer to our COVID response page, and for more information about UTI’s Welding Technology Training Program visit its overview page.

About Universal Technical Institute, Inc.
With more than 220,000 graduates in its 55-year history, Universal Technical Institute, Inc. (NYSE: UTI) is the nation’s leading provider of technical training for automotive, diesel, collision repair, motorcycle and marine technicians, and offers welding technology and computer numerical control (CNC) machining programs. The company has built partnerships with industry leaders, outfits its state-of-the-industry facilities with current technology, and delivers training that is aligned with employer needs. Through its network of 12 campuses nationwide, UTI offers post-secondary programs under the banner of several well-known brands, including Universal Technical Institute (UTI), Motorcycle Mechanics Institute and Marine Mechanics Institute (MMI) and NASCAR Technical Institute (NASCAR Tech). The company is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.

For more information, visit www.uti.edu. Like UTI on www.facebook.com/UTI or follow UTI on Twitter @UTITweet, @MMITweet, and @NASCARTechUTI.

¹ Source: Based on data compiled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections (2018-2028), www.bls.gov. The projected number of annual job openings, by job classification is: Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers. Job openings include openings due to growth and net replacements.

Media Contact:
Jody Kent
VP, Communications and Public Affairs
Universal Technical Institute
jkent@uti.edu
(623) 445-0872

 

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SOURCE Universal Technical Institute, Inc.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Sitetracker, the global standard for managing high-volume, repeatable projects for critical infrastructure businesses, today announced it has updated its platform to provide customers AI-driven predictive reporting and dashboarding through Salesforce Einstein Analytics. With this change, Sitetracker customers are now able to gather specific, deep, and up-to-the-minute strategic actionable insights on how they deploy and maintain critical infrastructure. 

Sitetracker Project and Asset Management integrated with Einstein Analytics

Already being leveraged by leaders in financial services, manufacturing, healthcare & life sciences, retail, and the public sector, Sitetracker’s integration of Salesforce Einstein into its AppExchange solution is now available to critical infrastructure providers around the globe.   

Comments on the News

• «Our team of Sitetracker experts configure Einstein dashboards efficiently, understanding and tailoring to each customer’s unique business needs while developing industry best practices that we can share with our customers,» said Mike Di Modugno, VP of Solution Delivery at Sitetracker. «By understanding which vendors will deliver the best results, predicting turnaround times on key milestones like permitting, and accurately forecasting closeout dates, our customers can have both easier and deeper insights into their most important revenue drivers.»
• «We are excited that Sitetracker is continuing to innovate by adopting and developing AI-based solutions to enhance high-volume project and work management,» said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. «AppExchange is constantly evolving to meet the needs of our customers, and we love watching our partners evolve alongside us.»
• «We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of hours developing Sitetracker on top of the Salesforce platform, transforming the daily operations of our 25,000-plus users,» said Tim May, CTO & Co-Founder of Sitetracker. «Adding artificial intelligence via Einstein is the next step in our journey to continuously enhance our solution and provide customers access to cutting-edge technologies. Innovations like Einstein will improve both their business processes and their balance sheets. I’m excited to continue delivering these transformative analytic solutions to our fast-growing customers this year and in the years ahead.»

About Salesforce AppExchange

Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise cloud marketplace, empowers companies to sell, service, market and engage in entirely new ways. With more than 5,000 solutions, 7.5 million customer installs and 90,000 peer reviews, it is the most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile, social, IoT, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies for businesses. 

Salesforce, AppExchange, Einstein and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. 

About Sitetracker, Inc.

Sitetracker, Inc. powers the successful deployment of critical infrastructure. As the global standard for managing high-volume projects, the Sitetracker Platform enables growth-focused innovators to optimize the entire asset lifecycle. From the field to the C-suite, Sitetracker enables stakeholders to optimize how they plan, deploy, maintain, and grow their capital asset portfolios. Market leaders in the telecommunications, utility, smart cities, and energy industries — such as Verizon, Ericsson, Fortis, Alphabet, British Telecom, and Vodafone — rely on Sitetracker to manage millions of sites and projects representing over $23 billion of portfolio holdings globally. For more information, visit www.sitetracker.com.

 

 

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SOURCE Sitetracker

BOSTON, Aug. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Over the course of a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we know it, ushering in a wave of regulations and measures that, for many industries, will translate to long-term policy and procedural change. The way we view the world right now, from both business and personal perspectives, is entirely different from the way we viewed it prior to the onset of the pandemic.

Understandably, the travel industry finds itself especially vulnerable in this new world. The meeting and event management segment faces unique challenges as companies establish effective ways to meet despite current restrictions.

Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien, the CEO of Groupize, discusses the questions and issues facing the industry, adaptation strategies, and the increased role technology will now have to play in meeting programs. With years of travel experience and a proven track record of success in group travel management, Alisa can leverage her expertise to shed light on the new normal for meeting programs.

The reality-check

During this crisis, the companies with an SMM program and centralized tool were able to act quickly and responsibly to manage their current and future events and meetings, while also having access to valuable insights from past meetings. But, do enough companies have a travel program that includes meeting policy? According to Alisa, no.

«The reality is that for most companies – meetings and events are a blind spot,» she explains. «It was the industry’s dirty little secret that decentralized and offline management of events and meetings was the status quo. While everyone agreed there was a big risk in not managing the 43% of travel spend related to meetings, no one agreed on whose responsibility it was to fix it.  Now both the C-Suite and Travel Managers have a spotlight on this issue to close the gap in their program, to eliminate risk and liability.»

For the first time in Alisa’s career, she’s hearing stories of unabashed support from all stakeholders in an organization to solve the problem. Finally, Travel Managers are finding allies in new places, including Human Resources, Security, Finance, Marketing, and more.

«I’m not comfortable calling this point in time a ‘new normal’ because nothing about this is normal,» Alisa notes. «It has, however, established a now indisputable reality that organizations of all sizes need to change the way they manage the meetings and event category.»

Alisa makes an important point here; although the beginning of the pandemic represented a turbulent time for the industry, it also exposed shortcomings that were in desperate need of attention and action. Right now, most companies are using this pause in travel to prepare for an ever-changing travel landscape; preparations which, in many cases, have begun with new travel and meeting policies. These policies are critical, but the only way for smart companies to implement, enforce, and audit these policies is with technology.

«Travel Managers are a critical stakeholder in the return to travel. However, without technology to support their requirements for every component of a meetings program and the actual events themselves, the risk is unquantifiable,» Alisa explains. «Every company that ever thought about implementing a meeting program in the past, but decided not to, has since regretted that decision. Perhaps more importantly, companies that had not thought they needed a meeting program now recognize the value and have an urgency to take action.»

We are all in this together

While travel has slowed down, some companies have become invaluable to their customers during these trying times, solidifying their position as a ‘necessity’ for the new reality.

«The pandemic has highlighted the importance of the core tenants of our value proposition  – cost containment, risk management, and traveler safety with visibility to all stakeholders with flexible workflows. We did not need to pivot post-pandemic. We were able to stay on course with simple enhancements such as virtual and hybrid meetings. Simply put, these market conditions have elevated our solution from a nice to have to a must-have. Every company with corporate travelers has a spotlight on them to de-risk meeting management.»

«Groupize has always valued partnerships, admired competitors, and continued to learn from our customers and industry trends.  In April, we were proud to unite 12 industry leaders on an eBook:  Meetings Culture for Modern Companies – which compiled peer to peer insights and best practices to help companies structure their programs moving forward.  In mid-July, we released a Groupize Assurance, helping companies with meeting program Preparedness, Readiness, and Response. Content like this, as well as many other recent publications from industry groups such as TAMS, are invaluable in a time of rapid and continuous change. The people behind the ideas are resilient and driving change in the industry, and we really are all in this together.» 

What companies can do today

Alisa shares her belief that this moment in time will drive further innovation in many areas of the industry as we look to emerging trends and evolving industry demands. In the months ahead, the travel industry will be expected to adapt quickly to the ‘new normal,’ while acting proactively to address attendee concerns and wellness.  In-person events and meetings are mission-critical to business, whether for revenue generation, employee development, team building, customer retention, or essential reasons.

This begs the question; what is to come? And what do companies do today?

«While we added features to our platform to support both virtual and hybrid events, we recognize that people are resilient and want to travel. I hear this every day from our customers, and people want to plan new events. While the structure of meetings and events may look different for the next one to three years, they will continue.  But even if a company has just one meeting on the books in the future, they still need to manage every component every step of the way. The liability is just too large to ignore, and change is no longer an option; it’s an outright demand and mandate.»

Moving forward, industry experts agree that every event, regardless of the size and scale, will require pre-event approval, along with budget and pre-trip approvals to follow. More importantly, meeting planners, travel managers, executives, and travelers will all need to become more flexible in their process, as meeting logistics will always be in flux.

Alisa explains that core components such as dates, locations, venues, attendee lists, social distancing guidelines, attendance protocols, and virtual attendance that, in the past, never changed, will now be increasingly subject to change. Fortunately, the Groupize platform not only tracks these changes but also helps to manage them. The ability to centrally cancel all flights/hotel rooms for registered attendees in the event of a cancellation, perform contract tracing, and establish collaborative workflows will be increasingly valued and necessary. Moreover, some experts anticipate an increase in smaller and simpler meetings, a category for which Groupize is the industry leader.

«Ultimately, it’s clear that doing nothing is not an option. Technology will help companies meet their responsibilities. Just this week, we released a risk assessment calculator, aimed at helping companies calculate the risk in their program as well as in each meeting. We recognize that the focus in most organizations has moved from savings to safety, and we are developing resources to help companies understand their obligations and take action.  We want to keep the CEO’s of our customers out of the headlines for lax or incomplete policies leading to bad press. Finally, we must see ‘meeting program management’ via a new lens in order to get back to business.»

Like Zoom to WebEx

«We have spent five years listening to the needs of the industry, and have developed the easy to use, easy on the budget, easy to deploy meeting management tool that planners want to use. Our path is very similar to Zoom when market needs changed; Zoom became the virtual meeting tool of choice because of its focus on accessibility to any user. We expect a similar trajectory for Groupize as SMM standards receive a much-needed makeover in the post-pandemic world.»

Groupize is the only complete self-service meeting management platform designed for enterprise-wide use. The technology manages all of the core meeting logistics, such as venue sourcing, registration, attendee management, and travel, as well as delivers mission-critical data for both risk and spend management. The platform brings oversight and insight into the largest area of unmanaged spend in a corporation. It can manage up to 97% of meetings and events not traditionally recognized as a meeting such as training, recruiting, projects, and engagements.

Groupize simplifies event and meeting management with easy to use tools that manage all processes in the lifecycle of a corporate event, creating better outcomes for all stakeholders. «At times like these, containing costs, managing risk and minimizing liability while focusing on traveler safety is a priority for every company. We are the entry point for all employees in a company to begin to manage any and all components of a meeting,» says Alisa.

Alisa also shares that the company has some exciting enhancements in their registration module that will make Groupize the solution of choice not only for enterprise customers but SMB’s as well.

In the meantime, Groupize will continue to develop features that align with the needs of their channel partners and customers, and this includes more functionality on approvals and budgets and for use cases like projects and recruiting.  Currently, the Groupize Assurance enhancement is focused on lowering end-to-end risk related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Groupize Assurance includes modules to assess, update, and standardize managed meeting processes, policy, and logistics – making every step trackable and auditable our central platform.

«As a company, we are fortunate that we are not in a position that would require reinventing ourselves or pivoting from our core vision, we can continue to focus on our mission and ways to get better at delivering our brand promise.»

Groupize is supporting companies that are starting or restarting their meeting programs or switching vendors by offering risk-free terms.

About Groupize

Winner of Phocuswright Innovation Award, BTN Top 25 Most Influential of 2017 and Skift 2019 Corporate Travel Innovators, Groupize is committed to reinventing event management with easy to use tools that simplify all processes in the lifecycle of a corporate meeting, creating better outcomes for all stakeholders. We turn difficult into simple, make the unknown known, and put an end to tedious tasks while controlling the largest area of unmanaged spend in a corporation. For more information, please call 1.855.GROUPIZE, or visit groupize.com.

Groupize
Madison Harris

508-232-7719 x 215
mharris@groupize.com
www.groupize.com

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SOURCE Groupize

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Consumers say they are deeply concerned about the privacy of their personal data, yet have come to appreciate the benefits of sharing it and are not making it hard for businesses to gather it. These findings come from an opinion survey on data personalization, privacy and trust sponsored by Genesys®, the global leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions. The survey gathered responses from 5,000 adults in six countries: Australia, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States (U.S.).

Despite recent consumer protection regulations, 91% of survey respondents worry about the potential abuse of their personal data, with 46% saying their concern has grown over the last five years. Nearly three-quarters (70%) say it’s unacceptable for businesses to share customer details with partner vendors without first securing permission.

Yet consumer behavior often contradicts the survey respondents’ claims of anxiety. Companies see their customers willing to trade their personal information for certain benefits or rewards.

«Many consumers are sharing their personal data without full awareness of how it will be used,» said Janelle Dieken, senior vice president for solutions and product marketing at Genesys. «While they don’t like the idea of data-sharing in theory, they recognize there are practical benefits to doing so – like highly personalized interactions. Companies need to make sure they clearly explain those benefits and tradeoffs in terms of privacy in order to preserve customer trust and loyalty.»

Big data, big dollars

Consumers recognize their personal data has financial value—to the point where many want in on the action. Thirty-nine percent like the idea of monetary compensation from a company for sharing their personal data, although 20% say they most value product discounts. Older generations in particular — 46% of Boomers compared to just 29% of Gen Z — are interested in financial compensation. Gen Z says they value greater convenience in using services (20%) and more responsive customer service and support (18%) in exchange for sharing their personal data with a company.

But when confronted with the choice of saving time, money, or protecting their privacy, the survey pool was torn about what they value most. Money is at the top of the list with 42% saying they register for club card benefits even though they know the business probably shares data with partners. But another 40% say they value privacy above all, as they do not trust businesses to keep their personal data safe.

Protecting people and property

People are also aware that certain data from the internet-connected devices they own and services for which they sign up may be shared even without specific approval. In general, the survey respondents are more comfortable if the data is doled out for physical security protection. For example, at the top of the list are smoke detectors or thermostats that provide readings to the fire department (38%), door and window alarms that notify the police or external security vendor (34%), or external or doorbell cameras that share video recordings with the police (31%).

People are the least comfortable (17%) with the idea of DNA analysis providers providing data to medical researchers. Moreover, a full third (34%) of respondents aren’t comfortable having internet-connected devices share any data.

Worth the risk

Privacy issues around third-party accumulation of personal data have grabbed headlines in recent years. Yet just over half (53%) of those surveyed say they take common steps to halt the tracking of their personal data — for example, opting out or disabling «cookie» collection software.

Within the survey pool, 91% claim to read privacy statements sent by companies such as banks and insurance providers that tell consumers precisely how their data will be used. However, only 20% of survey respondents say they review the privacy statements «all the time» while 28% rarely do.

A whopping 81% allow smartphone apps to access their location data, but only 16% automatically grant access to every request. Digital natives are especially willing to share their location data, with an overwhelming 88% of Gen Z and 90% of Millennials allowing access for at least some apps.

Below are some additional highlights from the survey conducted in the U.S.:

• U.S. respondents are the most matter-of-fact among the six countries about sharing data, with 37% accepting the idea that businesses provide it to like-minded vendor partners even if the customer has not given explicit permission. This compares to only 23% of New Zealand survey participants. However, there is a gender and generational difference in this attitude, with 42% of U.S. men agreeing that it’s fine, compared to 32% of women. Meanwhile, 75% of Boomers disagree!

• At the same time, Americans are the most troubled among the six countries at the potential abuse of their data, with 41% saying they are «very concerned» compared to only 22% of Japanese respondents. They’ve also seen a greater change in anxiety, with 59% growing more concerned today than five years ago, compared to 29% in Japan.

• In the U.S., 96% of Gen X is particularly anxious about potential abuse of data, with 52% saying they are «very concerned.» This compares to the somewhat more relaxed attitude of Gen Z. While 85% do worry, only 27% are «very concerned.»

• Rather surprisingly, U.S. Boomers are the least likely (13%) among the four generational groups surveyed to say they read privacy statements «all the time» compared to a high of 33% among Gen X.

• Among American Boomers, 29% are unaware they could be sacrificing their privacy when playing social media games or taking online personality quizzes. This compares to only 12% of Millennials. In fact, 44% of Millennials in the survey are okay with their data being harvested by these games, compared to only 16% of Boomers.

Download the slide deck with the multinational data for more insights from the Genesys survey. Press and analysts may request a copy of each country’s survey findings from the Genesys media relations team. For the U.S., contact genesys@sterlingpr.com.

Research Methodology

The online survey was conducted by Wakefield Research in April 2020. Participants were 5,000 adults ages 18 and up, balanced by gender, with 1,000 in the U.S., and 800 each in Australia, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.K. The margin of error for the multi-country audience is +/- 1.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

About Genesys

Every year, Genesys® delivers more than 70 billion remarkable customer experiences for organizations in over 100 countries. Through the power of the cloud and AI, our technology connects every customer moment across marketing, sales and service on any channel, while also improving employee experiences. Genesys pioneered Experience as a Service^SM so organizations of any size can provide true personalization at scale, interact with empathy, and foster customer trust and loyalty. This is enabled by Genesys Cloud^TM, an all-in-one solution and the world’s leading public cloud contact center platform, designed for rapid innovation, scalability and flexibility. Visit www.genesys.com.

©2020 Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Genesys, Genesys Cloud, Experience as a Service, and the Genesys logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. 

Contacts

Shaunna Morgan
Senior Public Relations Manager
Genesys
shaunna.morgan@genesys.com
+1 317-493-4241

Adriana Saldaña
Sterling Communications
genesys@sterlingpr.com
+1 408-395-5500

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SOURCE Genesys