This year’s International Women in Engineering Day theme is Engineering Intelligence, a phrase that feels especially fitting when you talk to Bryony Hartley, Operations Manager at Serrations.
Because while engineering is often seen through the lens of machines, products and technical processes, there is another kind of intelligence that keeps specialist manufacturing businesses moving forward: the intelligence to organise, prioritise, interpret, communicate, problem-solve and bring structure to complexity.
At Serrations, Bryony brings exactly that.
Her path into the business was not a sudden one. It began, as many good stories do, with helping out where she could.
“As you know, it is a family business,” she says. “Since I’ve known James, he’s always worked at Serrations, and over the years, a long time ago, I would help with things like translation.
That support grew naturally from there. Bryony speaks both French and Spanish, and in the early days she helped translate the company website, handle customer correspondence, and support the business in practical ways before officially becoming part of it.
“I speak French and Spanish,” she says. “Going back in time, I translated the website, did a little bit of translations for different things, and then the odd customer correspondence, but that was it. That’s all I did, really.”
That changed in 2016.
At the time, the consultant Serrations used for ISO support was retiring. The business was growing, and what had once been manageable as a periodic external service increasingly needed someone in-house, someone who could look after the quality management system on a regular basis and help the business stay organised as it evolved.
“So at that point in 2016, I started coming in one day a week,” Bryony explains. “Then that increased to a couple of days a week, so it was a gradual introduction.”
It did not take long for that role to expand.
What started with quality systems soon became something much broader: helping out with dispatch and invoicing, onboarding, recruitment support, health and safety, workwear, PPE, pensions, premises, grant applications, budgeting, forecasting, and the many day-to-day responsibilities that can easily absorb the time of a growing business if no one is there to hold them together.
“It’s a really varied role that I have,” she says. “I look after the quality management system still, I oversee health and safety. There’s some HR in there, so whenever we have new members of staff, I do the onboarding, and I help James with the recruitment process.”
She pauses, then sums it up in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a smaller manufacturing business.
“Sometimes it is just a case of sorting out lots of little bits and pieces,” she says. “And I think, have I actually done anything important today?”
The answer, of course, is yes.
Those “little bits and pieces” are often the things that stop bigger problems from forming. They are the details that make businesses more resilient. They are also the tasks that, if left undone, quietly begin to drag on everything else.
That is something James Hartley knows only too well.
“Oh yes, definitely,” he says, when asked what Bryony’s contribution means to the business. “It took a great weight off me to have Bryony taking on those important but small little jobs that did sometimes get left.”
He points to grant funding as one example.
“We have definitely, in the past, missed out on grant funding, because I’ve just not been able to face that level of paperwork,” he says. “Bryony was the one with the time and the skills to go through all of it and get it in a form that they were happy with.”
That mix of patience, organisation and follow-through has been especially valuable as Serrations has continued to develop, first as a growing independent business, and now as part of Kaleidex Group.
Before the acquisition, Bryony played a major role in helping the company through the due diligence process. While James kept the day-to-day business moving, Bryony focused on assembling the information, documentation and detail required to support the process properly.
“With Kaleidex, before acquisition, that almost became my full-time job,” she says. “Doing the due diligence. We were working at home, even, doing that, gathering the information, because that’s quite a big process.”
Since the acquisition, her role has continued to evolve.
“Now, post-acquisition, working again with Kaleidex on integration,” she says, “whether that’s with Liam, head of finance, working on new accounting software, new ways of working, or whether that’s working with Rhiannon doing things on marketing.”
There is also operational improvement work underway, including collaboration with Chris Spencer on 5S and visual management, work designed not just to improve efficiency, but to improve the working environment too.
“We’re doing some interesting things on operations,” Bryony says, “looking at 5S and visual management, looking at how we arrange the workshop, making it a more pleasant place for staff to be working, but also give a better impression to visitors coming in.”
Again, this is engineering intelligence in action: not only the intelligence to support a manufacturing business administratively, but the intelligence to improve how it works, how it feels, and how it grows.
Another area where Bryony’s skills have made a real difference is international communication.
Serrations is an export-led business, and the ability to speak other languages has proved valuable in practical, sometimes unexpected ways.
“It is nice,” Bryony says of being multilingual. “I do think it’s good to be able to speak languages, and just sort of have that understanding and the respect for different cultures.”
James remembers one example especially clearly. A long-standing French customer had become unexpectedly slow to pay, and normal attempts to resolve the issue were going nowhere.
“They kind of hid behind the language a little bit,” he says. “And then we were able to just say, right, Bryony, you can ring up. They’ve got no excuse of saying they can’t understand what I’m saying, because you’re going to speak to them in French.”
What followed was not confrontation, but clarity. A conversation. A practical solution.
“They actually then requested to go to pro forma,” Bryony explains, “and we were able to arrange things really easily, purely because I could ring up and speak to them in their own language.”
It is a small story, perhaps, but a telling one. Because it speaks to the kind of value Bryony brings: the ability to unlock progress where things are stuck, and to do it with calm, professionalism and understanding.
International Women in Engineering Day is often a chance to celebrate the women designing products, running projects, building systems and leading technical innovation. It should also be a chance to recognise the women whose work gives engineering businesses the structure, confidence and capability to keep moving.
At Serrations, Bryony Hartley is one of those people.
Her contribution is not loud. It is not showy. But it is deeply felt across the business: in the systems that are maintained, the people who are supported, the improvements that are implemented, the relationships that are strengthened, and the countless important details that do not get missed.
For a business built on specialist capability, global relationships and close attention to detail, that kind of intelligence matters.
And in Bryony’s case, it is helping Serrations grow stronger every day.