About Us

The Hynds Smarterwater Story

Smart technology built into the infrastructure system of cities – is the way of the future!

The traditional way of managing a city’s water system often presents issues like flooding, and sewer overflow – resulting in degradation of water quality and significant health risks to the end user.

Smart technology delivers near real time data to asset owners through a virtual network of sensors showing the location and performance of each relevant asset on their infrastructure grid. Instead of being reactive, asset owners (city, district or regional council) can become predictive, anticipate potential failures before they occur, and take evasive action. This significantly reduces the chance of flooding, overflow and other failures.

The whole community benefits from the introduction of smart IoT technology.

Smarterwater are part of the Hynds Group

Founded in 1973 by John and Léonie Hynds, the privately owned Hynds Group of Companies is New Zealand’s premier product supplier for the management of water and water based waste in the civil and rural infrastructure markets.

The Hynds Group now comprises nine business units including metal, concrete and plastic manufacturing; product importation and distribution; and trade supply. With over 800 employees now, Hynds remains proudly family owned, and has built its reputation on customer service and innovation.

Hynds Smarterwater are a division of Hynds Pipe Systems Ltd.

Hynds Pipe Systems is the largest operating unit within the Hynds Group of Companies, incorporating five manufacturing plants, a nationwide team of Engineered Product Managers, Contract Account Managers, and a network of 33 merchant branches throughout New Zealand.

Photo of the team with Hynds Manhole Cover

The Team

Product & Technical Team

Aaron Hynds | Director

Aaron Hynds | Director

Aaron is a Director of Hynds Holdings, and Research & Development Director for the Hynds Group. Aaron was one year old when his parents started the business and has grown up alongside the company as it also grew, from a single site in the garage of their South Auckland Papakura home manufacturing retaining wall components in 1973, to an Australasian business, now employing over 800 people.

Aaron spent 7 years in Japan in the 90’s from the age of 18, training in old martial arts. On his return to New Zealand, Aaron re-started his career at Hynds and undertook a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Business conjoint degree at Unitec in Japanese and Information Systems Management. He has worked in multiple roles within the Hynds Group of Companies including technical sales, purchasing, sales, production planning, ICT technician, ERP security and hardware management and Group Business Development Manager.

Aaron saw the opportunity to create smart infrastructure to enable asset owners to monitor the performance of their assets in real time. Over a period of 10 years Aaron investigated various technologies to enhance infrastructure performance, and now leads the Smarterwater Team in developing solutions for 3 waters asset stakeholders.

Aaron’s key aspiration is to create “clean, affordable water for everyone”.

Chris Miller | Product & Technical Manager

Following a Management and Engineering Cadetship in Engineering, Chris has work at many levels in sales and management with technology-based companies. With 30 years’ experience in the three waters industries, Chris also has extensive experience in hydro generation, pulp & paper, petrochemical and food & beverage sectors.

Chris brings a wealth of both technical application knowledge, and commercial understanding to the role. His breadth of experience includes working in hazardous area training and application in Singapore, instrumentation and process control throughout New Zealand, sales, product category, and inventory management,

Delivery of diverse customer-based solutions is prominent in Chris’s planning. He has delivered on projects such as the largest irrigation butterfly valves in New Zealand in the Central Plains Project, and the mechanical service packages for buildings such as the Price Waterhouse Coopers Tower and the Metropolis Apartments.

Chris believes people and skills are the most important assets in business. Protecting both through superior health & safety practises and business development initiatives is a responsibility he values. Chris enjoys leading his talented team, as they focus together on delivering world class results.

Photo of Wolfgang Pegado

Wolfgang Pegado | R&D and Service Tech

Wolfgang is a qualified technician with almost 10 years in the automotive industry. He later changed career directions contracting to a large petrochemical company servicing aircraft fuelling equipment, both mobile and static. He then moved over to the Quality Assurance and HSE. As a QA manager he got a medium sized company manufacturing anodes to the ISO 9001:2008 QMS accreditation.

On arriving in NZ, he continued in the working QA environment for a large plastics manufacturing company until moving and focusing on Health & Safety for a utilities company. Here he was involved in both coordinating HSE and implementing a remote/walk-by AMR reading program for local councils as well as other utilities.

On his down time, he divides his time SCUBA diving and mountain biking.

Engineering Team

Lixin Qian | Software Engineer

Lixin Qian | Lead Software Engineer

Lixin is a Software Engineer at Hynds, specialising in IoT based Smarterwater innovations at Hynds. He has a Master Degree of Information Technology and prior to coming to Hynds worked predominantly in software development in enterprise software (storage and cloud) and embedded software (firmware).

Lixin is passionate about cutting-edge technologies and innovative ideas to create new products that transform people’s lives.

Photo of Nicolas Suero

Nicolas Suero | Software Developer

Nico is part of the Software Development team of Smarter Water at Hynds. He has a Degree in Information Systems Engineering and 10 years of software development experience in various industries, including research, accounting, irrigation and streaming. Nico has gained expertise in all the aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle. Driven by customer-centric and agile principles, he focuses on delivering the best possible user experience.

His personal goal is to contribute to the community with tools that drive progress and provide general support to promote well-being, always taking care of the environment that surrounds us.

Affiliations

The Hynds Group of Companies affiliations include:

Partnerships and Sponsorships

Heart Foundation Logo for Web
Sustainable Coastlines Logo for web