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Its rural setting belies the multinational, multi-million-dollar business housed in a large workshop in the middle of a paddock, just outside the Taranaki town of Inglewood. By Neil Ritchie.
Set up by Inglewood couple Ash and Fiona Peters in 1999, the company now employs seven people fulltime, two casual workers, and has an annual turnover of about $2 million. Its jobs involve taking cameras, perhaps as small as a match-head, down into the inner sanctums of sophisticated engineering equipment to identify cracks, corrosion or other problems. This early detection of possible problems reduces plant downtime and operational costs, increases reliability and efficiency, and ensures better risk management, maintenance and budget planning. And what started out as a Kiwi business offering services to Kiwi companies, is now predominantly overseas focused. “A few years ago, the split would have been 60 percent New Zealand and 40 percent overseas, now it’s the other way around,” says Ash Peters. Digital’s work takes it all over the country, most of Australia and many parts of Asia on a wide variety of energy and non-energy related work on land and on offshore drilling rigs, oil and gas production platforms, and production vessels. Recent Digital developments include setting up an office in Brisbane and developing new inspection procedures, including one that Peters says will almost revolutionise the way industrial sites run their quality assurance programmes. Former Kiwi woman Gail Parr, with a background in water treatment systems, runs the Brisbane office. “There are a lot of opportunities in Queensland,” iterates Peters. The company’s initial focus in the sunshine state is on oil and gas, petrochemicals, steam generation, reformers, specialist machine manufacturing and dairy plants. There are a lot of quality assurance control in bacterial track and trace procedures in this area, says Peters. “All our Aussie clients have so far requested that we use New Zealand labour, so we send our guys over to ensure they get the best available. I know our guys have done exceptionally well and that’s been a shot in the arm for the boys.” Opportunities for remote digital video inspection (RDVI) in Queensland’s burgeoning coal seam gas (CSG) sector will be covered from Taranaki where Digital has designed procedures for inspecting pressure vessels and other equipment full of methane. “This will be particularly important to the CSG industry where oxygen cannot be introduced back into a system once the extraction process [of taking gas from the coals] has started,” he says. There is also an emerging problem, largely overseas, of “industrial sabotage” – disgruntled workers deliberately putting rubbish, from broken concrete or steel beam offcuts to bent deckchairs, in vessels or pipelines. “Some people go to some pretty extreme lengths but, fortunately, our RDVI equipment locates what these larrikins leave and enable it to be taken out.” Peters says Digital and an un-named joint venture partner, together with a Japanese corporation that is providing some technical input, are currently working on developing a whole new remote inspection programme, with the aim of taking a prototype system to the giant United States energy market later this year. “We are designing a quality assurance package specifically for industrial plants that are yet to be constructed. “The idea is that we get involved in the FEED (front end engineering and design) stage so that the video inspection process can be part of the overall design, drastically reducing plant shutdowns and maintenance times.” He is reluctant to disclose more details. “Some overseas companies are already trying to copycat us.” Peters says this new system has the potential to dovetail nicely with engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) procedures and other risk based inspection systems. “That’s probably the biggest new thing for us at the moment, a whole new remote inspection programme.” He predicts that if Digital gets its new RDVI system right, the company should be booking work years ahead. “However, we are careful to stay focused, not like a dog chasing two rabbits in a paddock, going different directions and ending up with nothing.”
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.2 March-April 2010 |
Amid the cattle of the Taranaki countryside sits remote digital video inspection company Digital Insight; a business that is now earning more from its overseas operations than it does domestically.