Geoklock visits Open House 2018
Open House is an event organized by Geoprobe, one of America’s equipment industry giants.
Geoprobe is one of the largest manufacturers of subsurface probing and drilling equipment and tools in the world. The Geoprobe headquarters is in Salina, Kansas, and not just anyone gets an invitation to go there. Geoklock’s Engineering Manager Ulysses Mourão and Geotechnical Services Coordinator Aldoíno Moraes were there for a whole week. They were attending Open House 2018, an event Geoprobe organizes every two years, for clients only.
Around 300 technical professionals from all over the world were there. “When developing new products, Geoprobe cares not only about all technical and operational details, but they also care about their clients’ experiences and feedback. During the event, they showed us different equipment. Some were very simple and versatile, already consolidated in the market, and some had very high technology and is used by environmental and geotechnical experts in the US,” said Mourão.
The highlights of the event were the new 7822 DT rig and the MIP – a probe Geoklock has already been using and that is considered state-of-the-art for high-resolution environmental investigations. Geoklock just acquired a new rig and a second MIP, further consolidating its forerunner position where it comes to new technologies.
Open House is a great fair for the introduction of new drilling and probing equipment and tools, as well as technological trends in the environmental and geotechnical markets.
According to Aldoíno Moraes, everything happens in the field, in a kind of testing area, where step-by-step demonstrations take place, with the opportunity for questions and comments. “It was a great chance for updating. We could confirm that Geoklock is at the top level in terms of boring equipment and techniques.”
Ulysses Mourão also mentioned that all they learned will be slowly passed on to the Geoklock team in Brazil, during specific training programs. “We had this chance to be with the Geoprobe engineering teams. In addition to the information they gave us, we also had the chance to clarify technical issues and ask questions about hypothetical situations, to get to understand all possibilities of equipment use. That will help us improve our operations and think of new ways we can use them.”
This exchange ended with an invitation – which was extended only to very few participants – for a tour of the plant. Mourão said they were at the production lines and could see the way Geoprobe plans each stage of the assembly, development and technological update of their equipment, as well as the logistics for product transfer and post-sale support and maintenance.
Both Moraes and Mourão agree that the next step is sharing the knowledge they acquired in this trip with the Geoklock technical staff. “This will optimize the investment made in this trip and create more capacity in our teams,” says Moraes. They also both agree that the most significant part of this experience was seeing that, in every way, Geoklock is in a same level of equipment and expertise as other international companies, following the same standards followed in the US – a country considered as a benchmark in the area of environmental and geotechnical probing and drilling.