December Newsletter

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate Christmas and Happy Holidays to those who don’t! It’s a great time to reflect on the year gone by and celebrate what has gone well and ruminate on what we could have done better. As the CEO at the end of the day it’s really about, “How well did the team go?”  I’d say we get 100% and an elephant stamp.

On a more serious note, to really assess our performance we need to look at our strategy: we have three core goals at HydroTerra:

1. Build the best market place for Environmental Monitoring Technologies.
2. Provide exceptional monitoring services and customer support.
3. Share knowledge: be the trusted advisers on environmental monitoring.

Market Place: we have grown this to have more than 120 suppliers. This gives us huge potential to assist industry across many measurement categories: surface water, groundwater, soil, air, weather and marine as well as monitoring effluent. With this scale comes the challenge of being able to support this wide range of products: we have embarked and dedicated resources to building a knowledge center to support our sales and service teams. With an excess of 10,000 models of equipment at our fingertips, these systems are essential to providing good advice and incrementally build our learnings. Theres no substitute for experienced technical personnel. We have invested in a highly technical sales team who do a great job of helping guide our customers through a myriad of choices.

Monitoring Services: our performance here is dependent on our technical team. We have recruited electronic engineers, instrumentation technicians and applied scientists to really grow our capacity to assess and integrate environmental monitoring technologies. A real highlight of the year has been the development of our Modular Integrated Systems. We have created a team that gives us the capability to provide these systems as assembled, fully tested and expertly installed solutions. Our Support team ensures these keep operating and automated processes keep us informed of their status.

Sharing Knowledge: to be honest, we are a bit obsessive in this area 😊. The webinars continue to provide our community with a place to share knowledge about environmental challenges and approaches to managing them. We are eternally grateful to all those presenters who spend the time to prepare and present. We are of course also grateful for the people who attend, and the great questions raised. These contributions really do enhance the forum. We have moved into more formal style of training this year; our groundwater sampling training course has proven popular. Thank you to ALGA for their support with the development and promotion of this course. We participated in the Inaugural Australian Hydrographers Association Technical Workshop –September 16th – 19th, Darwin (NT) where we delivered the groundwater training component. We are now collaborating with AHA on some further groundwater monitoring training (keep an eye out for an announcement early in 2025). Finally, we have developed a new tech talk forum: customised to meet a range of topics specific to our clients. These online forums provide a knowledge sharing focus on technology applications such as groundwater level monitoring for example.  We have delivered several of these over the last 12 months.  Let us know if you would like a presentation on a specific topic.

A big thank you to our customers. We appreciate the opportunity to work with you and improve industry practice.