18 months ago GEAR-systems integrated Drone Harmony into their multinational operations to take themselves to the next level. Saving themselves approximately 140 hours a year by doing so, Patrick and his team have been able to grow exponentially. This article will describe how that journey unfolded and how Drone Harmony was instrumental to GEAR-Systems’s success. 

Patrick and the team

Patrick Holtewes’s path to founding and running a leading drone surveying and inspections company, GEAR-Systems, will be well-trodden by many other professional surveyors worldwide. 

Patrick has always been a drone hobbyist, and during his 10 years as a network architect at Vodafone, working on mobile networks, he realized he could blend his hobby and job with startling results. By introducing drone inspections to replace the labor-intensive manual inspections, he can cut costs and save time for operators drastically.

“Instead of having a person going up in the tower, and needing two to three hours for one tower, we managed to inspect that same tower with a drone in around 20 minutes” 

Naturally, seeing the huge potential in the commercial drone mapping and surveying industry, GEAR-Systems was founded in 2019. Starting small, a lot of the projects in the early days were experimental, and he regularly called upon his drone hobbyist skills to get the job done, like when he attached his own FLIR camera using a personally 3D printed frame to his drone, for a rooftop solar panel proof of concept project. 

Taking operations to the next level with Drone Harmony

Now, however, in line with the growth of the drone inspection and surveying industry worldwide, GEAR-Systems is a completely different beast. Now employing multiple professional pilots across the Netherlands and Belgium, GEAR-Systems inspected and mapped an impressive 1,400 sites last year.  

It’s not just proof of concept projects either, now GEAR is covering the entire spectrum of commercial drone projects, including; building and asset inspections, agriculture mapping, building construction site progress reporting, solar panel inspections (with sites containing from 2,500 to 40,000 panels), wind turbine inspections and even the occasional festival filming here and there. 

“Four to six hours downtime amongst three people on the wind turbine can be reduced to, let’s say, 40 minutes” 

He’s upgraded his fleet to multiple DJI drones and others so that he’s no longer relying on ad-hoc DIY iterations. But it’s not just the hardware that has been upgraded to match demand, he’s also had to upgrade the software he’s using to take his operations to the next level. 

With GEAR-Systems’s business becoming a multinational enterprise operation, it was only natural that the teething problems he encountered with off-the-shelf manufacturer flight planning platforms became more exaggerated. Due to frustrations with unstable software, where features are not spread across every drone and frequent updates disturb the user experience too often, as well as way too much time lost planning missions, Patrick started to look for alternatives, and that’s where he found Drone Harmony. 

“When planning flights the day before a site visit, I used to sit on the controller, in front of a small screen for hours trying to create a plan. I thought this should be done differently. So being able to do it on a computer screen in Drone Harmony, with your mouse and just a few clicks, it was perfect.”

Intending to find an easier flight planning platform and one that would allow him to scale his enterprise operations with more team integration, Patrick first started using Drone Harmony 18 months ago. 

“The ease of the system for flight planning, especially when it comes to mapping and the inspections. That’s the main reason we chose Drone Harmony”

This unparalleled ease of use has translated into eye-watering time savings for Patrick and his team. He found that they save around 20-40% of time for each planned mission. If we do some quick math on this, even at conservative estimations that means that over 1,400 missions across the year, GEAR-Systems is saving at least 280 hours a year of valuable time. At conservative estimates, that’s around €14,000 saved per year (based on Netherlands salaries).

“The amount of inspections we did using the DJI M30T, unless we were using Drone Harmony, it simply couldn’t be supported.”

Of course, this isn’t the only way Drone Harmony helped unlock the potential of GEAR-Systems’s operations. With increasing regulations and uncertainty surrounding data security in the drone industry, Patrick was delighted to find that by using Drone Harmony, he could open the door to lots of government projects that would not be accessible otherwise. 

“Using a platform like Drone Harmony helps us get the government tenders we need. Drone Harmony ticks a box when these departments are analyzing our bid”

That’s not all, like many Drone Harmony customers, Patrick and his team were happy to find another unexpected benefit of using Drone Harmony; quicker customer support response times and direct feature development requests. 

“If I see the need and have the urge for a certain feature development, I can send an email, and I always get a reply. Or, even when what you’ve requested isn’t a priority in the developmental roadmap, you always get a response.”

These benefits have come together nicely to allow Patrick and his team to scale their operations from a humble private hobby to a multinational enterprise-level company. 

Taking things further with DJI Dock 2

And the future looks even more exciting. With the introduction of the groundbreaking DJI Dock 2 into the industry, GEAR-Systems is fully motivated to stay one step ahead of the game again. They have ambitious plans to utilize this unique technology, together with the DJI Agras, to transform the way farmers manage their sites and conduct their operations. With seamless progress tracking, either once or twice a week, allowing for immediate disease recognition and intervention, GEAR can promise to deliver accurate and regular data to farmers with simplicity, thanks to the Drone Harmony and DJI Dock 2 combination.

With the commercial drone market predicted to expand to USD 43.6 billion by 2025, it’s only natural that enterprises like GEAR-Systems are beginning to require something more to help them reach the full potential of their drone fleet’s capabilities, and Drone Harmony is right there to answer the call.