Towards Excellence in Operations & Maintenance

Introduction

Operations and Maintenance (O&M) organisations in the wind energy sector aim at optimising production and asset value whilst maintaining compliance. Onshore and offshore wind farms are getting bigger and therefore increasingly capital intensive. There is increasing pressure to reduce costs in this competitive industry and subsidies are being reduced. Technology is developing rapidly and many inexperienced newcomers join the industry. Beside step changes in technology, there is demand for improvement in operations. Operational excellence can be realised by adopting proven lean principles as applied in other competitive capital intensive industries. Improving a wind asset O&M organisation starts with the capability of selecting the right improvement measures.

Approach

Wind asset owners share the same value creation processes. Power generation, asset integrity management and compliance management. For each of these processes, lean principles can specify a path towards operational excellence. The following 5 steps towards operational excellence build up the maturity of the value chain as a whole (Womack & Jones, Lean thinking, 1996):

1.Value
2.The value chain
3.Flow
4.Pull
5.Perfection

O&M organisations assigned by asset owners create similar value chains to realise their goals. These value chains show a large diversity in maturity level. This maturity determines the starting point for improving towards operational excellence. From there on, easy to adopt solutions can be implemented, aimed at the realisation of the major goals of an O&M organisation. The learning curve steepness will rise with these tailor-made improvement projects. These projects will be easy to implement and are beneficial.


Main body of abstract

Asset owners start with specifying added value and determine which elements of O&M are part of the required organisation capabilities. If not decided to outsource (elements of) operations and maintenance, internal targets should be categorised on energy production, asset value and compliant operations.
Value chains are maintained to align the value adding activities. These can be categorised towards the core processes: power generation, integrity management and compliance management, and will be supported by the following processes:

•incident management,
•maintenance execution,
•resource management (includes logistics),
•personnel management,
•emergency management,
•general management.

Each process has only one best suiting effective improvement action on a certain level of maturity.

Effective improvement actions for each maturity phase in a wind energy project are as follows:
1. Value:
- Specify ‘standard work’, this is to be found in operating procedures.

2. The value chain:
- Specify the processes that describe the relation between the procedures,
- Specify the roles that have responsibilities in standardised tasks.
- Clear identification of the roles of the (IT) support systems. Special attention to accurate availability and wind power forecasting.

3. Flow
- Optimise the organisation size per identified role (headcount). Make sure to perform on downtime evaluation, corrective maintenance, condition based maintenance and assure high quality of maintenance scheduling.

4. Pull
- Set up and apply the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tree within a minimum of organisational levels. Implementation of top-down KPI driven performance management within the asset management system.
- Effective integration of the information feedback, as specified in ISO 55000, allowing energy production to follow energy demand.

5. Perfection
- Start with small improvement teams. Realise a self-improving organisation.


Conclusion

The performance of wind assets improves by applying the principles of lean into organisational development of operations and maintenance organisations. Start with assessing the maturity of the current value chain and use tailor-made improvement programmes towards operational excellence.


Learning objectives
• Apply proven industry experience in organisation improvement.
• Diversify the improvement approach, depending on the process maturity.
• Increase wind asset performance and optimise required resources towards operational excellence.