Counting on export Growth - Waikato Times 3 July 2003
Charlie Thurgood has made a career out of studying water and is now reaping the benefits. Melanie Feisst reports.
AS A BARTENDER in Fiji in the late 1970s, Charlie Thurgood spent his days watering the locals. When a group of hydrologists became his regular customers he soon threw in his cocktail umbrellas, joined the group and began a lengthy career studying water. He said he learnt quickly on the job, which is quite a contrast to the training required today.
Twenty-four years later Mr Thurgood is about to pack up again to travel the world. He plans to head to Southeast Asia, the US and Australia to develop contacts to expand his company's export network. His business, Hamilton-based Scott Technical Instruments Ltd (STIL), imports and manufactures hydrology , meteorology and traffic-counting systems.
He bought the business on arrival back in Christchurch in 1980 from a South Island farmer, Hector Scott, who had imported hydrology equipment when threatened with losing his stream water supply. At the time it was a small company supplying meteorological instruments to the Works Ministry, Met Service and several 'universities. Mr Thurgood recognised the value of the growing market.
He soon branched out to provide environmental and traffic monitoring to a wide range of organisations including farmers, city and regional councils, New Zealand and international mining companies, the Rural Fire Service and companies seeking resource consents. After two years he employed his first hydrology technician and began manufacturing specialised equipment.
A move to Kaiapoi followed to be closer to the company's major clients and he employed two more people, including one to work on the growing demand for traffic-counting projects.
In 1986 Mr Thurgood split the business and moved on office to Hamilton to be close to a growing Waikato and Auckland market. The Waihi Gold Mining Co has been using the company's water measurements systems for 24 years. The company's staff has gradually increased to 12 and they no longer work out of Mr Thurgood's garage.
Imports make up 70 per cent of the business, manufacturing to order and export makes up the remaining 30 per cent.
The company's products measure things such as rainfall, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and wind direction. It provides weather stations with the information needed for forest fire danger signs and the black traffic-counting road tubes. The technology behind the road tubes and several of Scott's other products is based on logging the pulse created when an object passes over a measurement point.
Traffic counting is a growing area for the business as more parties are interested in undertaking cost-benefit analyses for the development and maintenance of roads. The same technology has been used successfully by the Conservation Department (Doc) for five years to gauge the traffic flow on the country's walking tracks. When Doc approached the company to get an idea of foot traffic for funding applications it developed a completely buried trail pad that was not susceptible to vandalism. The 90cm by 50cm pad records the "pulse" data which can then be transferred to portable computers. The product was so successful that the Western Australian Conservation Department soon picked it up, followed by the University of Arizona in 2001. Since then STIL's Trail Pads have been installed in California and Arizona and an order has just been received from Florida.
Within the next 12 months the company expects to begin further research in conjunction with the University to develop a counter that differentiates between people, cars, motorbikes and horses on the American trails.
"Communities now want to use their limited resources in a more efficient manner," Thurgood says." Add to that the demands of the Resource Management Act in New Zealand and more people need to come up with data support to prove what they are going to do is not going to harm the environment.
Water resource management is another growth area for the business. In South Canterbury the regional council has commissioned the company to install its flow meters to monitor and record information about bore use. As water runs through a point in the farmers' pipes the flow meter measures time-related water volume and flow. The data logger then records the information and sends it to a web-based software system. An encrypted, or tamper-proof, version can be used by the council and another version is available for use by the farmer.
The data logger is capable of recording 200,000 pieces of data.
"The outcome will be that increasingly scarce water in the traditionally dry area will be better-managed for future use," says Mr Thurgood.
STIL's gauging logger has proved popular throughout the country, and the business has been exporting them to Australia for two years. The Australian exports make up 30 per cent of the loggers produced and Mr Thurgood hopes to increase this to 65 per cent when he takes up semi-retirement late next year.
