Meet Harry

This year, OAL will be celebrating its 30th birthday, so we thought it would be fitting to turn the spotlight on our founder and share a little about our very own Harry Norman.

The story begins, as Harry puts it, "when he stumbled on a robotics course at Coventry University." He instantly fell in love with the technology to which he was exposed and quickly saw its potential for application in the food and beverage industry; this sparked the entrepreneur within him.

For most people, being newly married with two young children to support might discourage them from following their dream, but not Harry. He was excited and convinced he could make a difference, so in 1993, at just 28, he founded OAL.

Initially, Harry's company developed software for machine builders and directly for food manufacturers. It quickly became successful, delivering profit within its first year of operation.

The Early Years

Propelled by customer demand for automation, Harry evolved OAL to offer turnkey processing solutions and quickly established a customer base that included some of the leading brands in the food and beverage sector.

Harry's extraordinary talent lies in innovation – the ability to look at something and instantly see a better way of doing it. Where others might walk past a process on a factory floor, dismissing it as 'the way it has always been done,' Harry sees all the inherent problems and immediately considers what could be possible. This ability has led to a wide range of innovations that have been instrumental to OAL’s success.

In 2001, Harry identified the significant risk associated with the labelling of food items. OAL set to work and launched OAL Connected – an automated way to verify labels and data coding on food packaging. This has become a market-leading solution for OAL, preventing labelling errors across 1,200+ food packaging lines, including leading manufacturers like Bakkavor, Pilgrim’s Food Masters, and Worldwide Fruit.

Full Steam Ahead

Harry is driven by success; each innovation that makes a difference only motivates him to strive for the next solution that will disrupt for the better. Observing an industry that was facing rising labour costs and increasing ingredient prices, Harry was convinced that food manufacturing needed to change. He believed that OAL could play a key role in driving such change and decided to set-up a dedicated innovation team and invest in new technologies that could make a difference.

The first result of this investment in R&D was ‘Steam Infusion’ that OAL launched in 2013. This heating, mixing and homogenising technology uses steam as the motive force delivering significant benefits over the traditional steam jacket cooking process. With the ability to double cooking capacity and develop exciting new food products, OAL’s Steam Infusion is now being used by food manufacturers across the globe. 

Robotic Automation

While continually looking to spot trends and opportunities for change in the manufacturing process, it would appear that Harry never forgot that Robotic course at University. Today, OAL is leading the market with its APRIL Robotics solutions that look to automate many steps in the food manufacturing process, radically improving productivity, food safety and traceability. 

OAL’s APRIL is being used to modernise powder weighing and batching and to automate key steps in the cooking process.  

Thirty years on, Harry’s passion has not wavered; if anything, his desire to innovate and make a difference has only grown. The capabilities of APRIL Robotics is applicable to many other industry sectors from cosmetics to tire manufacturing, from paints to pharmaceuticals. As Harry’s company goes from strength to strength, he gets closer to his vision of transforming sustainability and manufacturing operations with robotics and automation.

If you would like to discover more about our innovations and how they would be beneficial to your operation, then simply reach out to the OAL team – contact us.