OAL News
OAL's automation talent wins ‘Young Engineer of the Year’
We’re thrilled to announce that OAL's Software Engineer, Matt Ayre, won the Young Engineer of the Year award at the Food Processing Awards 2017.
Matthew Ayre at the Food Processing Awards 2017
Matt's story highlights how the food industry can attract the best and brightest; highly relevant given the well-documented engineering skills shortage in the industry. Having completed his degree in aircraft engineering, Matt changed his career path to becoming an automation engineer in the food industry because of the problem-solving challenges and variety of work involved in the UK’s largest manufacturing industry.
We nominated Matt because of the positive feedback received from our customers on his approach to work and skillset. The following references demonstrate the skills Matt has developed as an integral part of the OAL Connected team.
“I’ve been really impressed with Matt’s work ethic on site and his ability to communicate effectively with our team. He’s definitely one to watch for the future.”
“As always a difficult task to take forward the work started by others. Matt rose to the challenge of familiarising himself with the previous development allowing him to support existing engineering, expanding functionality and continuing the development to allow continued deployment to other sites.”
How will you make food tomorrow? We challenged delegates to imagine the digital food facotry of the future
The award's ceremony was held at the Doubletree Hilton, Coventry on Thursday 19 October 2017 as part of the Appetite for Engineering conference that took place earlier that day at the Manufacturing Technology Centre. Both events brought together industry professionals from all stages of their career journeys to inspire and educate, discuss and explore what the future holds for the UK’s largest manufacturing industry.
OAL was up for two other awards at the awards ceremony in addition to Matt’s entry. Our APRIL™ Cooking Cell was up for the Robotics & Automation award and our APRIL™ Robotic Ingredient Handling system up for the Future-Factory Enabling Technologies award. Both these categories were extremely competitive with the finalists from the most innovative companies the food manufacturing industry has to offer. And, although we didn’t win, it was still fantastic for us to be recognised as one of the best.
The awards season is not yet over for OAL. We’re flying the food industry flag at the cross-sector IET, Institue of Engineering and Technology Awards. APRIL™ Robotics is shortlisted for the Manufacturing Technology award in a highly competitive competition.
There were over 300 entries to the awards from 25 countries from industries including aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical. We’ll find out if we’ve been successful on the 15th November at the ceremony at The Brewery, London.
The year then ends with the Food Matters Live awards where our unique cooking technology Steam Infusion has been shortlisted in the Best Food and Drink Process or Technology category.
OAL to speak at food robotics event at CAFRE, NI
Are you looking to introduce more automation and robotics into your food factory? Join OAL at the Robotic Automation in Food Processing seminar hosted by the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise. The event is taking place at the Food Innovation Centre, Loughry Campus, Cookstown, Northern Ireland on Wednesday 25th October 2017.
The one-day seminar brings food manufacturing and agricultural professionals together to answer these key questions:
What capabilities does robotic automation offer that could be utilised?
How easily can it be implemented and maintained?
Is robotic automation right for implementation into your processes?
How cost effective can it be?
And now robotics and automation are much more advanced and affordable, we will be discussing what new opportunities this presents the agriculture and food processing industry.
OAL's Jake Norman will be building on from this and talking about how OAL are putting robotics and automation at the heart of food processing with our APRIL Robotics solutions.
Hear how we have invested, researched and developed the very latest and advanced robotics and automation technology to help food manufacturers solve their challenges driven by the increasing living wage, flatline productivity and food deflation.
Start your journey towards increasing productivity and efficiency with robotics and automation.
APRIL™ Robotics finalist at the Institution of Engineering and Technology Awards 2017
We’re very pleased to announce that APRIL™ Robotics is shortlisted for the Best Manufacturing Technology category at the Institution of Engineering and Technology Innovation Awards 2017. It's fantastic to be flying the flag for the food industry in a very competitive category. The Best Manufacturing Technology competition received over 300 entries from 25 countries from industries including aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical!
The esteemed judging panel including the Director of Innovate UK was looking for innovative uses of automation to improve aspects such as:
Quality / consistency
Cost reduction
Energy efficiency
Reduction in pollutants
Flexible / agile production
Market response / customisation
If you’ve seen the APRIL Cooking Cell in action, then you’ll know how different APRIL is and how the advanced the technology, engineering and design can improve the way we handle and process food products..
Other finalists in the Manufacturing Technology category include:
Plastic Logic Germany
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
FliteTrak
Biohm Ltd.
APRIL™ Robotics wins PPMA Innovation Award
We're very pleased to announce that our APRIL™ Robotics Cooking Cell won the most Innovative Robotics System award at this year's PPMA awards.
It's fantastic recognition from the food industry for all the hard work our team, customers and suppliers are putting into changing the way we handle and process ingredients with robots.
The judges were looking for “creative solutions” and “smart use of robotics” that lead to significant productivity improvements and cost reductions. If you've had the chance to see APRIL™ cooking then you'll know the sight of an industrial robot picking up a 500l cooking kettle is definitely different (watch the video to get an idea). And it's the emulation of how a chef cooks in a kitchen, moving saucepans around, that offers cost reductions through labour, yield enhancement and a reduction in capital equipment from the improved utilisation of assets.
More awards to come
Get the champagne on ice, there could be a few more awards to come too! We're shortlisted in three categories at the Appetite for Engineering Food Processing Awards:
Matt Ayre, one of our talented software engineers is up for Young Engineer of the Year
Our APRIL™ Cooking Cell is also up for the Robotics & Automation award
And our APRIL™ Robotic Weighing Station is up for the Future-Factory Enabling Technologies award
And finally… we’re flying the food industry flag at the cross-sector IET, Institue of Engineering and Technology Awards. APRIL™ Robotics is shortlisted for the Manufacturing Technology award in a highly competitive competition. There were over 300 entries to the awards from 25 countries from industries including aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical.
OAL inspires at Mission Possible Peterborough careers fair
On Friday 23 June 2017, OAL inspired students at the Mission Possible careers fair organised by the Skills Service at the East of England Showground in Peterborough. The event attracted more than 3,000 young students aged 14-24 to encourage them to explore future career options. With so many industries at the event, there was certainly a lot for them to learn about and consider.
OAL’s stand showcased our latest innovations in robotics and automation for food manufacturers to widen young people’s perception of engineering and the food manufacturing industry and to encourage more young people to continue with their STEM subjects and choose engineering as their career.
To get attendees involved and thinking more about the next 10-15 years of the food industry, we ran a competition asking them a key question.
What food will you be eating when you’re 30?
And, with a Kindle Fire tablet as a prize for the best answer, it was worth really thinking about their answers!
By the end of the event, we had more than 160 entries and it was clear that all of them knew that the food industry is dynamic and will be changing dramatically over the next 10 to 15 years.
We were really impressed with the scope of responses which considered current challenges in the world such as the growing population, rising obesity and people’s busier lifestyles. Many of the answers we received aimed to solve these issues using alternative proteins, dehydrated convenience foods and pills and potions full of all the nutrients an individual needs.
The winning answer recognised world hunger as a big issue and considered not just individual eating habits but the eating habits globally:
“A small pill that has all the right nutrients in it that fills you up. It would need to be affordable so it can help to end world hunger.”