This Article: Infrastructure Report: The Importance of Building Resilience was Published by New Zealand Herald for the Infrastructure Report 2024, Authored by Journalist Bill Bennett.
When Tonkin + Taylor’s New Zealand clients need help navigating through complex overseas business processes or transactions, the environmental and engineering consulting firm has a network of international consulting partners to call on.
Richard Hancy, Tonkin + Taylor’s executive leader, says his organisation’s membership of the Inogen Alliance gives the consultancy valuable insight into other markets and enables collaboration and learning. This is particularly useful in the context of responding to natural disasters and environmental sustainability.
“The Inogen Alliance is a 25-year-old global network of environmental health and safety and sustainability consultants. Over time it has grown to include more than 80 consultant companies in more than 60 countries. It’s very much an alliance based on collaboration and partnering.
“By being a member of the alliance Tonkin + Taylor can draw on expertise and experience from around the world and bring it back to New Zealand to help our clients and communities. At the same time, it gives us the ability to take the knowledge and experience that we have gained here and connect with our partners on the global stage. It means we can help with some of the issues the world is facing, including resilience.” “Resilience is not unique to New Zealand. It’s a global challenge. Communities across the world are grappling with the issues, we are able to help them while learning from those communities.”
While this is something multinational consulting firms might do internally, Hancy says the Inogen model is slightly different: “It is focused on organisations that have deep local knowledge and expertise. So Tonkin + Taylor is able to bring to the table an understanding of New Zealand and the way New Zealand operates, in a way which is very New Zealand-centric.
“Similarly, our partners can do the same thing. They could be in Mexico or the United Kingdom, or wherever they happen to be.”
Hancy says this gives clients a depth of knowledge that may not be available elsewhere. For example, Tonkin + Taylor has a 65-year history of operating in New Zealand.
Expertise, knowledge and experience may flow quickly between the companies that make up the Inogen Alliance, but beyond that there is a focus on local delivery. “We make sure that the work being done is appropriate and relevant for the local environment. We bring in the lesson, but not necessarily the exact way of doing things, we bring the lessons learned into the challenges we face and apply them here”.
He uses Air New Zealand’s membership of the Star Alliance as an illustration of how it works in practice for clients. “Through Air New Zealand’s membership of the Star Alliance you can get access to flights all around the world. The aircraft might not have Air New Zealand painted on the side, but you can be confident about the experience you get, and the quality of service is going to be on a par.”
There are times when Tonkin + Taylor gets an introduction to a new client through the alliance. “We got to know a huge global tech company through the alliance. A senior executive from that company was coming through the region and passing through New Zealand. We were able to offer our facilities for him to work out of.”
The alliance model comes into its own when a New Zealand company needs specialist on-the-ground knowledge about complex matters in an overseas market. Hancy uses the example of dealing with European supply chains to illustrate: “European supply chain regulations are changing, and companies need to understand how they relate to sustainability.
“European legislation has a global impact because supply chains run across the world, not just within Europe. Through our European partners in the alliance, we can connect directly into their learnings and understandings of how that legislation plays out so we can help New Zealand clients who are either in a supply chain or have a supply chain of their own which interacts with Europe. We can help them understand the requirements under those regulations and what they need to be doing to be compliant and working within those regulations”.
Global Kiwi Expertise
Sustainability is one of the key pillars of the Alliance, so as much work as possible is done remotely. Hancy says one of the lessons from the Covid pandemic is that you don’t always need to jump on a plane.
While much of the alliance activity takes place in the Northern Hemisphere, that part of the world dominates global trade, Hancy says it’s amazing how many businesses elsewhere have a business interest in New Zealand or look here for experience to help with their challenges: “We have skills and experience here which the rest of the world doesn’t encounter very often. Take seismic engineering; we have world-class seismic engineering expertise in New Zealand. This is very transferable into international marketplaces.”
Around the Pacific Rim, New Zealand swaps seismic engineering expertise with Japan or Chile and there is demand from Italy, which faces significant earthquake risks. He says: “The expertise learned after the Christchurch earthquakes is highly relevant on the global stage and this is where resilience fits in.”
He also says that overseas partners are increasingly investing in working with nature and that means drawing down on knowledge held by indigenous communities.
They look at nature-based solutions rather than traditional engineering-based solutions.
He says the work being done here in New Zealand in this area is much more advanced than in other countries and it seems to be attracting a lot of interest from Inogen partners. One area that has come up recently is artificial intelligence. It’s a fast-moving space, yet Hancy says Tonkin + Taylor is able to tap into the Inogen Alliance network to find out more about what is being developed and how it is being applied.
“It gives us the ability to tap into that broader learning and the broader applications that are being worked through in a way that we would never have been able to do that as a company on our own.”
Tonkin + Taylor is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Infrastructure Report.
