Fortress Technology wins prestigious lean manufacturing accolade

Fortress Technology, together with Sparc Systems, is celebrating being honoured with the distinguished Lean Manufacturing Award for its new Raptor Combination Metal Detector and Checkweigher food inspection machine.

Voted for by ‘the people’, the company received nominations from all over the globe in the Food Processing Awards 2021. Attending the Appetite for Engineering event in Coventry on 9 September 2021, the team learned at the award presentation that they had scooped this top trophy.

Leaning in the right direction

This Lean Manufacturing award acknowledges the success, excellence and innovation of companies that throughout the challenges of the pandemic continued to deliver the highest operational efficiency and implement best in class procedures and lean principles.

The Raptor Combi, on display at the PPMA Show 2021 (28-30 September), fulfils this brief, states Fortress Technology, "with its paperless, fully auditable COP test routine that pre-configures every test by retailer and product being inspected and alerts QA managers each time a test is overdue".

Given the current availability issues and rising food prices, the Raptor was specifically engineered to help food manufacturers counteract wasteful and costly product giveaway and eliminate contaminations from the global supply chain. The series comprises all three food inspection disciplines – metal detectors, checkweighers and now Fortress Technology’s first x-ray machine – and is available in any combination, including metal detector checkweigher, x-ray checkweigher and even metal detector and x-ray. 

Innovative and useful solutions

Event organiser and Food Processing magazine editor Suzanne Gill comments: “The judges were looking for innovative and useful solutions for use in food production environments and the Raptor Combi combined metal detector and checkweighing system certainly ticked those boxes. It takes advantage of the natural synergy, in terms of complementary technology, between weighing and inspection, in addition to offering cost savings for end users, due to the better utilisation of common elements and providing functionality improvements, due to the fact that users will become more familiar with the system and there will be commonality of data capture.”

Fortress Technology managing director Phil Brown points out: “High operational efficiency has never been more important than now. Making this Lean Manufacturing Award even more special. It is testament to the dedication of our entire team which has worked tirelessly designing our brand-new Raptor inspection series that delivers the best value to performance to our customers.”

Representing the very best the food and beverage sector has to offer, the annual Food Processing Awards 2021 honoured a total of eight companies for achievements, including smart technology, sustainability, food safety, robotics, automation and packaging machines.