“It feels a little like falling from the sky – and now it’s about the landing.” This is how our customers in the wind energy industry respond when asked about upcoming and ongoing changes to political conditions and the economic consequences those changes involve. Two aspects come together here: cost pressures for the building and servicing of wind turbines are rising rapidly. And it has become clear how important it is to have consistent, complete documentation that covers the full life cycle of a turbine and contains information from every party involved. It’s hard to know what to do, and plenty of measures are being taken to escape from this apparent predicament.
Below are two examples demonstrating how to face this challenge:
1. Performance indicators in technical documentation
We now perform “controlling” for almost anything we can think of, so why not technical documentation?
There are good methods for determining KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), methods that are accepted and supported on all sides. They illuminate the current situation in technical documentation and identify ways to master the flood of information that has to be created and managed. These ways usually involve measures, many of them process-related. Large volumes of documents are now produced by a variety of departments. They are, however, rarely managed in such a way that target audiences can access them precisely and rapidly – if they even know where different information is stored. Here, KPIs can be the starting point for a much leaner and faster process that ultimately provides the right information to the right person (a service technician, for example).
2. Increased pace through external assistance
The current upheaval has rapidly spread to companies which often lack the resources for countermeasures and for creating an efficient information structure, because their own teams are busy creating day-to-day documents. This is where information experts come into play. They know this process inside and out, and they can provide intensive assistance and help during this transformation. They bundle activities, channel information flows, and create workflows that are often many times faster and cheaper than the information structures set up when these companies were established, many of which still exist in their original form.
By successfully introducing a KPI system (see above) and restructuring information processes, the wind energy sector can tackle the upcoming change processes quickly and effectively.