Success Story: Gamesa Corp.

Summary

Gamesa’s quality group deployed TrackVia to manage the continuous improvement and servicing of wind turbines installed at customer sites. The results have been a major success:

• Business Impact: Substantially reduced time required to manage field service operations – savings of 15 hours per week on average

• ROI: 1316%

• Payback: 26 days

“I need to be able to track and run reports on my own in as little time as possible. As soon as I saw TrackVia, I immediately realized that it was the tool for me. I’m able to automatically broadcast alerts and non-conformity reports (NCR) to specific groups of people. I no longer have to manually create messages in order to send NCRs to field representatives.”
--Tamara Baez, Control Center Supervisor

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Challenge

Gamesa is a company that manufactures wind turbines and builds wind farms. It has installed enough wind turbines in 25 countries spanning 4 continents to generate more than 16,000 MegaWatts (MW) of power. The annual equivalent of this production amounts to more than 3.45 million tons of petroleum (TPE) per year and prevents the emission into the atmosphere of over 24 million tons of CO2 a year. With branches in 13 countries, Gamesa is one of the world's leading companies in the promotion and development of renewable energy.

Gamesa wind turbines are installed at over 600 wind farms worldwide with a rapidly growing number of those occurring in the US. When the US operation was formed in 2006, the quality group used paper forms as the means to generate non-conformity reports (NCR), service or repair requests, for specific wind turbines. There was no practical way for field representatives to access SAP in order to electronically generate NCRs. This paper-based process created several challenges:

• The information provided on the forms was inconsistent from one form to the next – moreover, rarely was all the needed information provided requiring control center agents to contact field representatives and ask them for the missing data

• Once an NCR was created properly, the process of notifying specific field representatives and contractors of the tasks and parts required for a particular request was time consuming

• The status of NCRs was tracked manually through phone calls and emails creating latencies

These challenges prompted Tamara Baez, Control Center Supervisor, to search for a solution that would be simple to deploy / maintain, inexpensive to own, and easy for a nationwide, field-based team to share regardless of their location.

Solution

Baez knew that a technology-based solution was required. It had to be powerful enough to meet operational requirements but easy enough for her to deploy and maintain without IT support. She moved in the direction of online databases and considered three alternatives. Two of them were unintuitive and difficult to setup. TrackVia, however, was simple, powerful, and affordable – just what she was looking for. With TrackVia, her team was able to accomplish the following:

• Get up and running in three days – including setup of the relational database, creation of forms / views, and import of existing data – without help from IT or external consultants

• Improve workflow automation – service representatives both at headquarters and in the field can create and track NCRs in TrackVia through an internet browser running secure socket layer (SSL)

• Once an NCR is created, automatically alert and inform the responsible service representatives and contractors through TrackVia auto-generated emails

• Synchronize data between TrackVia and SAP – TrackVia provides the NCR data to SAP and SAP provides an official tracking number to TrackVia

• Automatically track a service request through each stage in the workflow: assigned, in-process, work completed, and closed

• Quickly respond to ad hoc requests using an internet-style search box – representatives can search using any term in the database such as customer number, serial number, part number, and issue type

• Easily run standard or ad hoc management reports on service performance and issue trends

With TrackVia, the quality group has been able to continue providing exceptional service to its wind farm customers in a much more time- and cost-efficient manner.

Benefits

Implementing TrackVia to manage the NCR workflow has paid off handsomely for Gamesa’s US operation. Although the number of installed wind turbines has increased dramatically over the past 3 years, the quality group has actually grown more efficient due to the process automation enabled by TrackVia. Baez estimates that TrackVia saves the quality group 15 hours per week on average which, during the first 12 months of TrackVia’s use, resulted in an ROI of 1316% and payback in 26 days.

According to Baez, “TrackVia has allowed internal processes to run more smoothly. We’ll have people and materials in the right place at the right time to get the job done.” The magnitude of these improvements has not gone unnoticed. Other groups are now using TrackVia in new applications such as contractor certification tracking and tool maintenance alerting. Baez even has employees visit her from headquarters in Spain to learn how to use TrackVia.