Strat Aero PLC (LON:AERO) Sales and Marketing Director Bill Bauer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their unique approach to survey and inspection, the role that Unmanned Aerial technology plays and the importance of data in this process
Q1: I understand that Strat Aero have a unique approach to survey and inspection, can you explain to us how this works?
A1: Yes, what we find is a number of companies come to us with challenges around managing their industrial assets and what I’m talking about here is big bits of plants so things like cell towers or wind turbines, they come to us with issues about things like big industrial buildings or plants that are being built. We tend to come at this from a number of angles historically so there’s a part of the work where we do sort of initial surveys to help people actually do their preparation for constructing these assets and very often we’ll get involved later where we’re asked to try and do some inspections to make sure these things are in good operational order. What we’ve sort of evolved over time is a kind of life cycle approach which I think is a bit unique where instead of seeing the kind of initial survey as being something very separate from the inspections and seeing the inspections as being one-off activities, we see the whole thing as being an end to end story.
So let me just kind of illustrate that for you to help it makes sense, imagine that you are building for example a wind turbine farm and the first thing you need to do is to have a very accurate survey so that you can show you can pick exactly the right spot so you can actually get your construction work started then you get this built. What we find is it’s then very helpful for customers to have a very detailed inspection of the outer build structure so they can be sure they pay for something that’s gone through commissioning that they get exactly what they wanted. What we find is that people often want to have a survey so that they can then go back to regulatory authorities to show that exactly what they said they were going to be build and where they were going to build it is what they built. Then when the asset is in operation people need to have regular inspections, by tying together the survey and the initial inspection work, we can then do those regular inspections and see not only what’s happening at that particular instant that we’re doing the inspection but we can show how things have changed between one inspection and the next and that’s very helpful because people want to know not just is there a problem but is the problem getting worse and if so, how quickly.
We can also, as part of that life cycle approach, schedule in any inspections at particular critical moments so very often for example there’s the warranty period and customers need to have a very detailed inspection done just before the end of the warranty period to ensure they’re making any warranty claims before the warranty runs out. Finally of course, nothing can last forever and people very often need to have an end of life survey, not just for example when they’re selling the assets from one business to another as part of their due diligence, but actually when things are being taken down and cleaned up. Again, we can do a final survey showing how everything has been cleaned up to the specifications they want.
I think that overall approach to really thinking about survey and inspections, not just as individual point actions at this specific moment, it really is part of a continuous life cycle, it’s unique and very powerful.
Q2: What role does Unmanned Aerial technology play in this then?
A2: One of the things we tend to say internally at Strat Aero is ‘it’s not the drones it’s the data’, customers in the end are not terribly interested in how we go about doing the work as long as it’s done quickly, economically, safely and accurately and that’s the things they are about. For us, we find the unmanned aerial vehicle technology is extremely helpful because it allows us to do inspections from above which is physically the thing that’s difficult and dangerous to do by traditional methods and that plays a very helpful role in our overall armoury so we may well for example do a piece of work which involves both taking hydrographic surveys from a rigid-hull inflatable boat and doing some elements of traditional land survey on the ground and then you have the UAV’s to compliment that from the air. So what I’d say is it’s not that we are somehow kind of obsessional about the UAV technology as such but we find that it plays a very helpful role in our overall armoury.
I think the other thing to say is because it enables you to do work really without climbing on structures, it means that we can survey and inspect things whilst they’re in live operation. That’s very helpful because as you can imagine for asset owners actually switching things off whether it’s taking all the electricity and powering down all our cell phone towers or whether it’s turning off industrial processes for a chimney stack, the ability to do the survey and inspection work quickly and safely without needing to power assets down is very helpful.
So the combination of all of those means the unmanned aerial technology really adds a lot to our portfolio and enables us to do stuff in a way that has a lower impact for our customers in terms of cost and inconvenience.
Q3: Now you emphasised the importance of data in the process, how do Strat Aero manage this?
A3: Yes absolutely, it goes back to the whole ‘it’s not the drones, it’s the data’. So we built a big engine called our Digital Data Manager (DDM) which allows us to really take all the data that we collect and all the action metadata which goes with it and store that in a way that allows our customers to have access to the information they want without having to do a whole lot of work themselves. So let me again give you a concrete example because I know it’s sort of a bit of a mouthful – so let’s imagine that you want to have a solar farm inspected, it’s not really all that helpful for us to fly a grid pattern over that solar farm, take a whole lot of video in optical and in infrared and then give you, as a customer, a huge set of multi-gigabytes or terabytes video files. Actually that’s not really useful to you, what’s important for you is to have the actionable insight so you want know which of the panels looks like it’s not working well and the other thing, coming back to that longitudinal view I mentioned earlier, you want to see whether if it’s not working if it’s deteriorated a lot since the last week or month or quarter it was surveyed.
So what we do is we build the analytics into our Digital Data Manager so as the customer you simply log on, you find the stuff that you want through your graphical user interface, that’s very simple to us, and you drill down to the actual actionable insights that you need to do something valuable for your business in managing your assets. So that’s really the way it works, underneath it all it’s the sort of 21st century technology you’d expect with a big relational database and lots of cloud-based servers and storage so that’s not anything surprising. So that’s how we do it and we think it’s a powerful approach.
