Historic marking & traceability technology manufacturer forging on

8 mins read

This year, Pryor Marking Technology is celebrating 175 years of bringing its marking and traceability technology to manufacturing companies. Justin Burns visited the company’s Sheffield city centre headquarters to hear more and find out about any future plans

This year, Pryor Marking Technology is celebrating 175 years of bringing its marking and traceability technology to manufacturing companies.

The city of Sheffield has a rich industrial heritage and the ‘steel city’ has since 1849 housed a manufacturing gem in Pryor Marking Technology – which this year is celebrating 175 years of providing part marking and traceability tools and machines to the market.

Originally focused on supporting the cutlery and knife making industries that Sheffield is famous for, and then supporting the growth in stainless steel when it was discovered in the city in 1913, Pryor now supports their global customer base from their headquarters, close to the company’s original manufacturing location.

Pryor was established on 23 May 1849, when William Pryor purchased a mark making business where Edward Pryor, his son, was serving his apprenticeship. Edward was then at the helm before his sons Edward and George, ran Pryor in 1883 and 1898, respectively.

The company was then taken over by Edward’s grandson Ronnie Pryor in 1938, before in 1978, he transferred ownership to a charitable trust, to ensure the long-term success of the company. It is sill owned by the same trust today and operates from the same headquarters in Sheffield city centre, where it employs around 90 people.

Pryor’s staff stay for decades and 52% of its employees have 10 years or more service, while current managing director, Simon Dunn, actually started out his career as an apprentice at Pryor in the 1970s.

GLOBAL PLAYER

Pryor is now internationally recognized for its marking technology and has been exporting around the globe for more than 70 years and today, its technology is used across manufacturing plants in 90 different countries, while it also works in more via its global distribution network.

From Sweden to Senegal, Mexico to Malaysia, Pryor provides some of the largest global manufacturing companies with the equipment they need to maintain traceability in their production process.

With its head office, and manufacturing facilities based in Sheffield, its global operations are supported by wholly-owned subsidiaries in both France and the US, where it employs five to six staff in each office.

Sales director Dan Stephenson explains that Pryor has been working in the US for 30 years, but only set up the subsidiary as recently as in 2017, as business had been going so well across the pond.

He notes it is a constant battle with competitors from across the globe, notably in China, who are driving the price of marking machines down, so Pryor focuses on providing the most innovative and high-quality products in the market.

Machine manufacturing as a whole in the UK as fallen in recent years, but one unique USP of Pryor is that all of its products are manufactured in the UK and it proudly sports the Made in Britain registered trademark on its products.

Pryor did for a time manufacture at a plant in India, but reshored all the work back to the UK and MD Simon Dunn notes that since it made this move, the company has actually become more competitive.

He adds: “We are always exploring how we can make the business more efficient so we can compete with some of these threats from overseas, like China.

“In the US market, we are competing with overseas manufacturers and competing quite aggressively with them and winning business as well. We are securing distributors which traditionally would have gone with some of these overseas suppliers, but they are coming to us.

“We try to give that balance of a quality product and a competitive price as well. There is a way to go but lots of ways we can be more efficient.”

ALWAYS INNOVATING

Pryor still manufactures the manual marking products it was found on back in 1849, and it remains a key part of the business, but it has evolved and innovated in line with its customers. It now provides 14 different marking technologies, including laser marking automated solutions, and its Traceability software package.

The company’s broad product range includes dot peen, laser, scribe and chemical etching marking machines, as well as a range of traditional hand marking tools. Machine types include portable/handheld, bench and desktop, floor standing and specialist equipment for integrators.

Pryor was actually the pioneer of dot peen marking machine technology that it developed in conjunction with an aerospace supplier in the late 1970s and the first to be operated around the world. 

Stephenson explains: “We have a product range that goes from a few pounds, right up to the turnkey, custom-built design-to-order projects that could go be up to £1m for the likes of electric vehicle manufacturers that use our marking technology on their new production lines.”

Pryor’s best-selling machine is the PortaDot 60-30 Touch – a handheld portable dot peen marking machine launched two and a half years ago, featuring Pryor’s new 4000 integrated control system.

Stephenson notes it is a versatile marking machine and provides a fast, convenient method of marking a huge variety of parts in multiple locations. Pryor will launch a new version of the PortaDot 60-30 Touch later this year, allowing users to control it via an app or tablet.

The latest innovation launched to the market by Pryor is the MarkMate Laser, a desktop marking machine designed to meet the demands of a variety of marking applications – accurately and with speed.

At the heart of the MarkMate Laser is a fibre laser capable of delivering crisp, permanent marks on a wide range of materials including metals, coated metals, plastics, ceramics, and more, for engraving serial numbers, logos, barcodes, or intricate designs.

Stephenson explains the MarkMate Laser allows Pryor to compete aggressively against other marking machine manufacturers across the globe, as the price point is more favourable for manufacturers for this high-quality level of machine.

He says: “Laser marking is becoming more popular. More companies are exploring it and looking at how they can introduce it because there are numerous advantages, but there are also some considerations.”

While not a growing market segment, Stephenson notes that Pryor still sells a huge amount of traditional hand tools, often used by SMEs. These hand stamps are made for handheld steel and metal stamping and made from hardened and tempered steel for maximum safety, before being nickel plated to protect from corrosion.

Dependent on use and the materials being marked, these traditional tools provide permanent high-readability inscriptions on leather, wood, plastics and all metals including steel and aluminium.

Stephenson notes that dot peen and laser marking machines (portable and bench top and desktop) make up 80-90% of Pryor’s business with the rest of the marking technologies (scribe, chemical etching and hand) accounting for the rest.

TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Pryor has evolved over the last 175 years and Dunn believes there are more potential avenues the company can evolve into for marking and traceability technology, while there is plenty of future growth opportunities, especially in providing design to order (DTO) marking systems for production lines.

He explains: “Rather than just selling a piece of hardware now, we focus on selling a custom solution – the handling equipment, integration, software and we sell lots of automation plants.

“Companies will just chop out a hole of their production line and put our marking solutions in. These are great opportunities for us and provide added value and that side of the business shrinks and expands as well.”

Pryor has been housed in Sheffield city centre for the last 75 years, but in a few years’ time, it is set to relocate to a state-of-the-art out of town site to power future growth.

The move will give the company more space to manufacture its products, make its manufacturing processes more efficient, cut its energy bill, improve logistics and be a better place for its staff work.

Dunn explains: “For a long time we have been planning to move away from this site and the board of directors have been kicking the idea around for the last 20 years, but now is the right time to do it.

“When the energy crisis hit us, it focused our minds on the cost of heating and lighting, the logistics not being ideal and our current site has become a real prime site for development so we feel the timing is right to relocate and reinvent ourselves.

“We have called it ‘Project 175’. The idea being we are reinventing ourselves to position the company for the next 175 years. It is a great opportunity to be able to relocate from here and reinvest back into the business and is not just about moving from these premises.

“It is about what we want to invest back into the business in terms of machines and processes. We have a team of line managers putting together a plan to not just move across the machines to a new facility, but to step up with new processes, equipment, and develop the best floor plan possible to get the optimum workflow.”

Dunn says it is “very exciting” for the company and it is moving forward with the plans which he hopes will take place in the next two or three years.

“We have a very good handle on what processes we need to improve and the equipment we need to facilitate that improvement,” he says. “We are pulling all that information together so when the time is right, we can look at what we do regarding the building we locate to and, what we reinvest back into the business to take us to the next level.”

Visit www.pryormarking.com for more.

BOX

Automated laser VIN marking solution transforms Jaguar Land Rover’s production line

Pryor Marking Technology helped Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) to overcome challenges with marking cars in its production line, with installation of the world’s first automated laser vehicle identification number (VIN) marking system that has improved speed, quality and flexibility.

Every car that rolls of a manufacturer’s production line has a VIN – the vehicle’s unique fingerprint and a combination of 17 numbers and letters – which is applied after painting, but before other components have been installed.

Applying the VIN has always presented challenges, as the mark must be accurate and clear enough, while be applied rapidly on production lines that may have a cycle time of a few seconds.

These demands have led to carmakers to find automated approaches to vehicle marking as the manual marking approach used in the 20th century is too slow and error-prone to suit modern manufacturing processes.

Production engineers at JLR were wrestling with challenges and pondered whether laser marking technology might provide a solution, so they approached Pryor for support.

After looking at the requirements, it became clear conventional laser marking technologies would not be up to the task so Pryor developed a high-powered laser system that could be adapted to give a consistent mark of the right depth (capable of marking 0.5mm deep) in short cycle times.

The next challenge was integrating that technology into the production environment and that required Pryor to apply a host of other smart technologies.

Pryor mounted a camera on the robot next to the marking head to locate defining features on the vehicle’s body. Combined with a laser displacement sensor that measured the distance of the panel from the marking head, the vision system could be used to define the precise position of the marking location in 3D space, allowing the robot arm to adjust the position of the marking head accordingly.

Then to ensure marks could all be read and verified automatically, Pryor developed an adaptive lighting system that alters both the colour and the angle of the illumination of the cell after marking.

JLR initially commissioned marking cells for its plants in Solihull and Halewood, in the UK, but then asked Pryor to install further cells at its manufacturing facility in China. 

Each cell is a light-proof box, with roller shutter doors that close automatically once a vehicle body is inside. The sealed environment protects staff from the high-powered laser light and allows precise control of light levels inside the cell to ensure optimum performance of the vision system.

To allow process supervision and aid quality control, multiple CCTV cameras inside the cell monitor the whole marking process, and their output is recorded along with other key process data.

In a steel bodied vehicle, laser marking a single VIN takes only four seconds, compared with the 30 seconds required by the old scribe marking system.

For Pryor, the project with JLR is the next step in a continuous evolution of product marking technologies that stretches back to the middle of the 19th century.