Sheffield-based Pryor Marking Technology won the Design and Innovation award at last the national Manufacturer of the Year awards ceremony (held at the ICC, Birmingham in November) for “having a culture and commitment to innovation that has transformed the company”.

For over 165 years, the company has been providing the technology for UK manufacturing to reliably identify its products.

In that time, it has gone from making hand-cut punches with cutler’s trademarks to robotic systems for imprinting machine-readable coded data on high-specification aerospace turbine blades.