The Surrey-based pneumatics manufacturer is due to open a division in Bratton-Fleming in July
NDMA welcomes the arrival of another world-class manufacturer to the rich network of companies in the area, and with it, employment and apprenticeship opportunities within engineering. In particular, the company’s structure reflects encouragingly on women in engineering and a positive approach to training new engineers in the area.
Clair Harrison, Business Operations Director explains the decision to start a factory in the West Country in her own words:
“My husband and I run a highly successful engineering company in Farnham, Surrey and have recently expanded to open a South West division which begins trading from 1st July 2018, I will be overseeing the Devon Division with the help of one of our daughters, a young engineer herself.
Our North Devon address will be: 3 Kingdom Fields, Grange Hill Industrial Estate, Bratton Fleming, EX31 4EN.
We specialise in building electrical and pneumatic control systems and small assemblies for a wide range of industry sector applications for large household names such as EDF and GSK. We currently build systems for trains worldwide and built the systems for the Thames barrier in the last few years. We also specialise in filter, dryer and power loom manufacture and we are a supplier of Norgren pneumatic parts which due to our long-standing relationship we can offer good discount on. Please see our website www.harrisonpneumatics.co.uk for more information.
At our Farnham site we employ 6-7 highly skilled engineers, and although the limited company is only 5 years old, we grew from the Harrison Pneumatics partnership which ran for over 30 years.
We have strong manufacturing and industry links with the South East, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds and have grown consistently in the last 5 years as Simon and I changed the focus of the business away from service engineering to being focused on our strengths as specialised systems builders. I feel our success is due to 3 key things; having built such a fantastic team of talented, hardworking people; we have the ethos that we share the success of the business with everyone who has been a part of that success and we teach everyone who works for us to know and value our customers and suppliers and ensure our relationships and quality of service/product and communication is paramount; we are all a team and part of something much bigger and every person plays their part.
We feel that as we ourselves as a family are now enjoying living in beautiful Devon for the past 2 years, we wanted to give back to Devon by creating some employment opportunities and investing in local suppliers where possible. We are lucky enough to be at a point where we can do that.
We are hoping to recruit and train up a slightly younger company in North Devon with small assembly and loom work, so that they can progress to more technical panel builds as their skill sets and confidence improves; and with personal development, hopefully carry the business forward in the future, so we are looking to make connections with Petroc college for apprenticeships as well as standard recruiting and we are looking forward to making introductions to other local businesses as we look for local suppliers for machinists and fabricators and, of course, how we might be of service to others in the area to meet their own manufacturing and pneumatic parts needs.”
