How Siemens Gamesa powers global deployment of installation, commissioning and service of wind turbines

Background

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy is a global leading provider of wind power products and service solutions. With a total capacity base of 103 GW, the company sets #1 position in Offshore and #2 in Onshore & Service. With over 24,300 employees operating in 90 countries, SGRE had a number of tasks to solve:

1. 1 Find a robust mobile solution that would unify document management processes across company departments worldwide.
2. 2Produce thousands of completed and signed inspection checklists by technicians, minimizing field inspection time and costs.
3. 3 Increase efficiency based on insights from the data collected onsite.
4. 4 Win the market competition by reducing project costs.
5. 5 Ensure smooth solution scalability, quick user adoption and compliance with company policies and requirements.

Solution

This is a story of how a small pilot project of 15 Siemens Wind Power (back then) field engineers in the UK can grow into a massive global deployment of an iPad + a robust software solution. In 2013 that pilot project with Fluix was started in the UK. That was the time when Siemens Wind Power started to look for options to bring more efficiency to paperwork-based processes, introduce innovation and improve their customer experience. The initial results were beyond expectations and Siemens Wind Power started rolling out Fluix into its processes worldwide.

As of 2020 the company itself has undergone many changes and is now Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, but Fluix has to date stayed at the core of all processes related to site documentation. And the numbers speak for themselves.

Beyond the numbers:

1. 1 Leveraging capabilities of the iPad, Fluix enabled technicians to capture data on site, fill out mobile checklists, add photos with geolocation to inspection reports and digitally sign their work on the go.
2. 2 Procedures and field inspection checklists are updated in real time and shared with all parties instantly, ensuring version control and granular access to documentation.
3. 3 Collaboration within teams and enforced company-wide workflows enable Siemens Gamesa to get fully completed work faster and with less manual procedures.
4. 4 Unified process of storing, distributing, working with and collecting documents from technicians working onshore and offshore.
5. 5 Training, being mandatory part of SGRE operations, has become easier and takes less time than before due to the intuitive interface of Fluix and the way it is managed.
6. 6 With the ability to aggregate and analyse all of the maintenance data, HQ got a clear picture of the needs of each site and the amount of time employees spent handling paperwork decreased significantly. The ultimate outcome was the ability to pinpoint compliance with operations requirements with one click of a button.
7. 7 Ability to analyze trends in individual wind turbine performance and save field inspection costs on additional service visits.
8. 8 Centralized real-time control over team operation.
9. 9 Quick tracking of use of defect tools.

Feedback collected from the field continuously show that the mobile inspection app is easy to use, saves time and effort for the guys in the field once they get the knack of it and basically lets them focus on their work rather than paperwork that prior to Fluix was a true hassle.

Results

1. Faster project delivery to customers and an improved customer experience
2. Reduced field inspection costs (2,000 man hours saved a year) and ensured quality
3. Scalable all-in-one mobile inspection solution provided by a reliable partner
4. Unified document management process across company and contractors worldwide

As SGRE has introduced Fluix to multiple partners and subcontractors on various projects, showing its benefits and ease of deployment, the product has increasingly become the industry standard solution of choice for more and more companies in wind energy.