For wind and weather
GLOBAL TECH I OFFSHORE WIND GMBH
About the customer
Global Tech I Offshore Wind GmbH operates a far-offshore wind farm in the North Sea about 130 km from the coast. 80 wind turbines of the 5 MW class are installed here on the 41 km2 area. The park has a nominal capacity of 400 MW and
has its own park-internal offshore substation. Around 40 people cover the 2-week shift operations at the wind farm. These include service technicians for the wind turbines and about ten Global Tech I employees who are responsible for the operation and maintenance of the platform.
Offshore wind turbines and the substation are exposed to harsh North Sea environmental conditions such as salty air and water, wetness, currents and strong swell. However, trouble-free operation is crucial for the economic viability of the offshore wind farm. Thus, in addition to regular maintenance, short response times for service calls are the absolute aspiration of the operators in order to minimize possible downtimes.
Challenge
In order to provide qualified support for the planning, execution and documentation of plant maintenance, an enterprise asset management system is essential. Global Tech I worked in the construction phase with a very compact maintenance system that met the minimum requirements. Therefore, for the operating phase, the company was looking for a powerful maintenance management system that could support as many business processes as possible beyond the core EAM functionality, that could fully map the wind farm’s plant structure, and that enabled the audit-proof integration of documents by means of the connection to a document management system.
Maximo offers us a customized solution for our specific situation. The system enables us to display a complete lifecycle of the individual assets and to plan and document maintenance work in a traceable & audit-proof manner.
Solution
Global Tech I decided to use IBM Maximo in combination with the modules of the Insight Control Panel as well as the data migration tool of RODIAS GmbH. This combination allows the flexible mapping of the wind farm’s plant structures, offers the stability of a standard IBM solution and reduces customization efforts by covering many use cases in the standard product. RODIAS supported the configuration and customization of the Maximo system and a mobile solution, the conceptual design and implementation of the interfaces, as well as the data migration.
The system is used by various user groups. These include the maintenance crew at the wind farm and at the substation, as well as the operations control center and the specialist departments at the company headquarters in Hamburg. The system is in use without interruption. The EAM system has interfaces to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP system and the ELO document management system. The interface to the ERP system ensures that material planning, material requisition and material consumption messages can be recorded in Maximo. The interface to the document management system enables uniform document storage and ensures the availability of all documentation on plants and processes.
The maintenance crew at the wind farm and substation uses the Insight Mobile solution. Work processes such as round robin execution, order releases, and putaways/relocations were mapped. These work steps are documented directly in the Maximo and Dynamics NAV systems; subsequent recording is no longer necessary. The special feature of the mobile solution is that work processes from two different systems were combined in one mobile solution.