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Letter From The Editor

True North | Winter 2020

Pat Hills

Can You ‘Throw Down’ In Today’s Workplace?

You have years of experience. You have dependable employees, reliable equipment, software, processes and a core group of clients who have come to trust your work. These basic tenets make your company the one your customers rely on. A slow clap and kudos to you - you’ve knocked it out of the park!

Then the calls come…your biggest client asks if you can produce an engineering drawing of sixty kilometres of secondary highway. Another client asks you for a high-resolution dataset of an urban neighborhood and they need it in a month. Can you get your head and arms around these requests? Whether you can or you can’t, the industry sees a measurement component in any project and you are the one they call. Do you see this as a burden or a blessing?

The truth is, you don’t have to be everything to everyone, provided your contacts and relationships are such that you can build a solution and remain that go-to resource for your clients. This website lists the top one hundred infrastructure projects in Canada. The top fifty are over $1B! Projects being released in Canada these days are huge and, in every case, they are executed by a JV (Joint Venture) comprised of multiple firms representing various disciplines and expertise. These firms then hire sub-contractors, etc. to complete the work.

Since these types of projects would be a stretch for most companies, we’ll pump the brakes here and focus on ones that are smaller, but nevertheless fall in the margins of your expertise. Perhaps a project where you are asked to create a detailed 3D as-built plan of a parking garage, or a topographic survey of an entire neighborhood - quickly. Or maybe you are asked to report on movement of buildings while construction goes on underneath. You could possibly use your existing equipment and get the job done or do one of two things. A) Enlist the expertise of a colleague of yours with experience in these areas. (We call this co-opetition). Or B) (and you must have known this was coming) you can call Cansel.

I speak a lot about Cansel’s Professional Services team. In its simplest form this group performs multi-tiered technical support and training. I’ve written, as well as included articles on the workflow optimization and customizations the team can perform to create efficiencies and remove bottlenecks in your business. This group can also execute the surveying and create the deliverables for you in the form of assisted rentals or proof-of-concept exercises. In other words, you can shadow Cansel on the project from end to end to decide if the technology workflow is right for you. If it is, we move forward with training your group for future projects. If it is not, at least you have fulfilled your client’s requests and delivered the goods.

Bottom line: If your client challenges you to perform outside your comfort zone, we’d like you to consider Cansel’s professional services team as one of your partners to succeed. We are here for you for more than just shipping boxes of GPS receivers and total stations.

As always, our professional services group is featured this quarter in True North. See how they customized a solution for the Moncton Parks Operations to measure and perform maintenance on low hanging branches in urban neighborhoods. We have new scholarship recipients to announce and a great article on Geoidal Heights by Babak Amjadiparvar.

Have a great winter everyone, and an accurate day!

Pat Hills
Director, Technical Marketing
Cansel