High-tech pipe scan unearths export pot

By GEORGINA BOND

Trumping their competitors in the wastewater industry is more than a pipe dream for brothers Trevor and Geoff Logan.

Their company, CleanFlow Systems, is flourishing in the niche business of peeping into underground pipes in cities worldwide.

The high-tech business based on the North Shore makes a tool that can accurately detect faults in wastewater pipes and manholes. This can help to save city councils millions of dollars and prevent unnecessary digging up of roads.

CleanFlow's core product, the ClearLine Profiler, is a precision measurement device which projects a ring of laser light on to the inside of an underground pipe. The image is then recorded by a closed-circuit TV camera as it travels through.

The profiler can accurately detect holes, weaknesses and deformities caused by erosion and heavy pressure to give an indication of the pipe's structural strength. It can also calculate debris volumes and water levels in a pipeline.

CleanFlow has also developed a software product to analyse the images and produce precise reports, removing guesswork for fast, accurate assessment of their condition.

Auckland City water and wastewater utility company Metrowater and bulk drinking and wastewater company Watercare were the first to use the technology, which is now exported to the US, Italy, Germany Turkey and Russia.

One sale this week will put the profiler into a sewer system in Turkey that is 5000 years old.

Although there are other devices for measuring inside pipelines, the image-processing is one point that sets CleanFlow Systems apart.

Chief executive Trevor Logan started the company Creative Business Systems, which trades as CleanFlow Systems, 10 years ago when he worked as a consultant designing computer systems.

Geoff Logan, an electronics engineer, came on board in 2000 as the chief technical officer.

A year later, the company was the first to move into Massey University's E-Centre, a technology business incubator in Albany. It was also the first to graduate this year, but has stayed on campus.

Trevor Logan said the local market was too small to sustain growth, so exports had to be a major focus.

Forty per cent of last year's sales came from Germany and 30 per cent from Australasia. The US is the next growth market the brothers want to tackle.

Geoff Logan said exporting was not as easy as they thought.

"We'd always had an ambition to export, but we were a bit naive as to the cost," he said, pointing to travel commitments and the length of time it had taken to build up relationships and to educate the market and sales and technical staff.

Venture capital has also been elusive and most of the growth has come from personal investment.

"It's been hard, but there have always been incremental steps upwards," said Trevor Logan.

Annual growth-rates in the order of 30 per cent and 40 per cent have been seen in the past few years.

The brothers consider breaking into the German market one of their greatest feats, "because they [Germans] are technically savvy and for a small New Zealand company to have something good they don't have was pretty big", said Geoff Logan.

Some 22 profilers, worth about $20,000 each, have been sold to Germany in the past year.

Trevor Logan said there was plenty of scope for the growth to continue, as the core technology could be applied to different types of pipelines.

There was also the option of exploring other applications such as measuring the dimension of railway tracks to assess wear.

The company won two awards for excellence in innovation and exporting at the North Shore Business Awards in August.


Clean Flow Systems