Hint: Your partnerships matter as much as your technology.
“You have to surround yourself with really smart, driven people, and that includes your relationships with technology vendors. Our relationship with Leica has been a game changer.”
—Joe Romano, PLS, Principal/Vice President, Langan
Your clients expect you to provide exceptional quality on their surveys, and they need their deliverables yesterday. You know technology can help you deliver more value with a faster turnaround, but almost as soon as you make an investment in one new development for GNSS, total stations, or reality capture, a better version comes along. Simply keeping up with the latest advances is challenging; maintaining a reputation as an industry-leading innovator seems impossible.
Unless you rethink your strategy.
For Langan, a premier engineering and environmental consulting firm headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, with offices in more than 40 locations worldwide, technology innovation is a key differentiator in client satisfaction and business success. But getting there isn’t about the technology as much as it’s about the people.
“You have to surround yourself with really smart, driven people, and that includes your relationships with technology vendors,” explains Joseph Romano, PLS, principal/vice president of Langan. “Our relationship with Leica has been a game changer.”
Become a Valued Technology Advisor
The origins of Langan’s partnership with Leica Geosystems date back several decades. In fact, Romano, a seasoned surveyor with more than 40 years of experience, can’t recall a time he didn’t work with Leica. And that doesn’t just mean using Leica branded equipment.
“We provide input into current technologies, workflows, and options,” Romano says. “The ability to talk to the people that work in the software and are making the next versions of the software and hardware is invaluable. It’s critical to our success and to the profession as a whole.”
Romano recalls a situation where Langan invested in a large number of data collectors from Leica so that all their survey equipment would be on a common platform. The data collectors were exactly what they needed, with two notable exceptions: 1) the default terminology for stationing was “chainage” which was confusing to the field techs; and 2) a measure button didn’t perform the function expected in the field. Romano expressed these concerns to a Leica rep during a HxGN LIVE technology conference.
“Within a week after coming back from that conference, we received a patch to fix those issues,” Romano says. “And it wasn’t just Langan that received the updates—those updates were made for all Leica customers. That was an amazing thing. But we’ve experienced it multiple times. The team on the Leica side is always very receptive and collaborative. It’s a win-win for the whole market.”
Include Your Technology Partner in Your Business Deals
For Langan, the partnership is a two-way street. In addition to providing suggestions for technology improvements, the company has found value in engaging Leica experts in meetings with their clients and prospects.
“When you’re trying to push the envelope of what’s possible on a project, sometimes the client wants to hear from the technology provider,” he explains. “We had one large remote monitoring project where we would have never gotten the client to understand the value of what we were attempting to do if they didn’t speak to a few people at Leica.”
On a complex mobile mapping project, having Leica experts speak to Langan’s capabilities and knowledge was valuable in helping Langan win the project.
“The relationship works both ways for us and has been rewarding,” Romano says. “It gives us a lot of confidence going into projects knowing that Leica has our back.”
“The ability to talk to the people that work in the software and are making the next versions of the software and hardware is invaluable. It’s critical to our success and to the profession as a whole.”
—Joe Romano, PLS, Principal/Vice President, Langan
To talk to one of our experts and learn more about mobile mapping or other ways to optimize your surveying potential, please contact us.
