Hi folks! This is my first post in the community, and I’d like to share a project our team worked on. First, a bit of context: the company I work for is an SAP implementation partner (we’ve been on this journey for about 20 years!), and this project was for a U.S.-based energy company that operates in several countries. In this case, the work was done in a LATAM country.
It was a really exciting project because it had the potential to impact millions of people. Basically, the company needed to improve the process of inspecting wind turbines, digitize a process that had been fully manual, and integrate that data with the PLM Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)/Plant Maintenance (PM) module. And when I say it was a high-impact project, I mean it: the energy produced by these turbines was feeding the power grid for about 40 million households.
There were two main aspects we needed to optimize through technology. The first was the inspection process itself. These turbines are massive (over 500 feet tall - around 150 meters), which made manual inspection both extremely dangerous for operators and very time-consuming, not to mention dependent on favorable weather conditions.
The second was ensuring uninterrupted service, to avoid power outages that could affect people’s daily lives and harm the local economy.
Our solution was implemented in three phases:
Phase 1: Drones
Together with the client, we defined which drone to purchase, considering flight autonomy, battery life, weight, and software compatibility to connect with the app we developed in the next phase. These drones were equipped with high-resolution cameras to capture detailed images and videos of every part of the turbines.
Phase 2: App development
We built an app for field technicians to document inspections with photos and videos. The app includes machine learning image recognition models trained to identify wear, cracks, or other anomalies. Based on those findings, technicians could generate and execute work orders directly from the device. The app works both online and offline, which is key since turbines are often located in remote areas with poor connectivity.
Phase 3: SAP PM integration
The app was integrated with SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) so that detected defects automatically created repair orders. This eliminated manual steps and ensured that the data captured in the field flowed directly into the maintenance process.
To keep it short, here are some of the results we achieved with the team at Inclusion Cloud:
- Work-related incidents during inspections were reduced by almost 50%.
- Inspection time was reduced by 35%.
- Data input errors dropped by 99%.
I hope you find this project interesting! I’d also love to hear if anyone here has worked on something similar.
Bluesky
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