Digital Transformation of Wind Turbine Manufacturing and Operations

Since 2010, the world has been witnessing an accelerated deployment of renewable energy and it has outpaced annual additions of conventional power capacity globally. Wind power, in particular, has dominated the renewable energy industry for many decades. To ensure continued growth and profitability, the industry needs to transform its ways of working nd prioritize the adoption of new technologies to support its manufacturing and planning needs.

In India, as per the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, there is a lot indigenization happening in the sector with a strong ecosystem and project operation and manufacturing capabilities through private and public partnerships and investments. India today has the fourth largest wind installed capacity after China, US and Germany and looking at the opportunity there is a lot of opportunity for companies to reinvent and relook at their manufacturing operations.

Wind turbine manufacturers are constantly innovating with new designs, materials, and manufacturing processes. Some recent innovations include drivetrain gearless direct drives, modular designs, lower solidity blades, and intelligent controls. This shift will not only drive greater product differentiation but will also provide manufacturers with a significant amount of previously untapped data reservoirs. This data will help them analyze and optimize the performance of their wind turbines to the point that could potentially lead to further product innovations and possibly avoid premature turbine failures. Manufacturers are also looking to automate their production to improve reliability, increase standardization and adopt best production practices.

To pursue business agility and to stay competitive, manufacturers are constantly evaluating and changing business needs, models and strategies. A crucial step is to shift from legacy systems to digital solutions for true agility and competitive edge.

Leveraging the value of manufacturing operations management (MOM)

Ever-changing customer demands, market trends, and fierce competition in the renewable energy market compel manufacturers to sharpen their competitive edge by digitalizing their manufacturing operations. Digital acceleration allows manufacturers to create optimized plans that take into account real-time data and conditions. It helps them understand the impact of disruptions on manufacturing operations. By consolidating disparate shop floor legacy systems globally, manufacturers can eliminate data silos and unify data from different shop floors onto a single platform. This integrated platform is accessible anywhere and anytime by anyone in the team.

To achieve a standardized and integrated operations approach for all plants, manufacturers should look beyond their basic manufacturing execution systems (MES) capabilities and adopt a broader MOM strategy. Under a MOM strategy, the endto-end flow of activities that include people, processes, materials, and machines related to production can be better controlled, tracked, and documented.

MOM-Integrated detailed planning and scheduling

A single wind turbine is assembled from 8,000 plus components. With this complexity, inventory shortages can cause substantial delays on assembly lines. Other challenges include synchronizing assembly and sub-assembly lines, material flow, poor visibility on the shop floor, and last-minute scheduling, all of which have an impact on final delivery. MOM-integrated detailed planning and scheduling enable quick and proactive identification of potential manufacturing challenges such as bottlenecks and delays on assembly lines, and of how they can affect customer demand. It helps manufacturers ensure material flow synchronization and visibility of the shop floor and its scheduling.

The right digital solutions let manufacturers identify these challenges through simulation. By analyzing different potential scenarios, manufacturers can make better decisions and deliver on time. Furthermore, they can synchronize production with other factories through seamless integration with other enterprise resource planning systems. As a result, they can share planning and data KPIs with the entire organization, partners, customers, subcontractors, and suppliers. This increases customer satisfaction and reduces inventory.

A Single Manufacturing and Operations Solution

A platform for MOM provides unparalleled capabilities that integrate multidisciplinary as-built and execution information in a single and global collaborative environment. The industry will gain standardization, deployment, management, and governance of best practices and processes. Offering a platform-based, unified data model, MOM enables a single source of truth for manufacturing an as-built model. The platform approach enables manufacturers to experience synchronized, secure, and highly coordinated information flow. They can also achieve complete visibility and control over disparate manufacturing processes beyond the wind turbine plant floor when data, process, and information silos are eliminated.

Next, manufacturers can plan and validate their manufacturing processes virtually before the start of production. As a result, they can minimize production costs, shop floor delays, and issues, while ensuring higher product quality and desirable production throughput. By being equipped with greater operational flexibility and agility to respond to changes, they can replicate any improvement, design, and build at any facility globally.

Conclusion

It is costly to manufacture wind turbines, but you need to find ways to keep the total installed costs low as the price offered per kilowatt-hour is decreasing. To remain competitive and increase innovation, efficiency, and cost savings, you must transform by implementing smart digital planning tools into your manufacturing operations management. Most importantly, these digital offerings must provide a centralized solution built on a unified data model that extends across plants and supports the traceability of parts and processes. With a unified platform, one can ramp up production in line with future expansion plans and empower your teams to communicate, organize and solve problems more effectively by working on a single source of truth.

A platform that acts as a backbone to enterprise and value network transformation.This way, one can decrease development and operating costs, reduce manufacturing time and increase product quality. As a result, be able to develop and deliver better-performing wind turbines faster in a set quality, easily offsetting your production’s carbon footprint. With a single global, scalable and flexible platform, one should be able to experience authentic business resilience that seamlessly links planning and manufacturing execution with full visibility on the impact of any decisions before execution.

- Mohammed Azmathullah, Sales Director, India, Dassault Systemes