**Mark Colwell ** VP, Vestas Wind Systems
Mark Colwell | VP, Vestas Wind Systems
Mark Colwell
At Vestas Wind Systems, Mark Colwell is responsible for determining the company’s Industry 4.0 roadmap. Mark believes that there is no easy way to achieve business transformation. He says, “there are four key elements to any transformation - analysis, assessment, commitment and discipline. The first step is to determine the challenges and envision the solutions to mitigate those challenges, this requires analysis and assessment of the existing infrastructure and tools. The next step is all about committing to the cause and working in a disciplined manner to achieve the set objectives. It's not easy to spend five years improving master data and infrastructure, you have to be committed to success to get success. Without a deep commitment you are taking a risk you cannot afford at an organizational level.” In this interview, Mark shares his perspective on various facets for digital transformation – from the importance of having a vision for future to finding the right set of partners and from having an outcome-based focus to having a common goal across the organization.
Mapping Industry 4.0 to Renewable Energy Sector Requirements
One of the key and longstanding requirements in the wind energy industry is grid integration. There has been a lot of technical development around this, with most recent being building hybrid power plants. Vestas has been at the forefront of this development and built the world’s first large scale commercial grid-connected hybrid power plant in Australia. One of the basic expectations in the electrical power generation industry is good grid integration. Now, this can be done in many ways, from pure energy storage to drawing out the peak to deal with the low points, but, most importantly, it is a function of how well we integrate the grid and communications and how do we manage the interaction with the other elements in the grid.
Providing better value to customers is another requirement that follows naturally and is the utmost priority, especially in our industry, where the product is a large configured and customized product. We are not making 5 million identical units a year, so managing and controlling cost differs from the other industries. Optimizing the cost and improving quality by improving across the total value chain is the only way ahead. The customers' demands are constantly increasing and we need to be extremely good at what we do which means we have to constantly focus on improving our core processes and, we need to have a lot of ability to leverage the knowledge of our very diverse and distributed teams.
This is where collaboration presents itself as one of the key requirements of the industry. Globally, in the 80+ countries that we operate today or where we have wind turbines installed. In all these locations, we also need to deal with the global marketplace, the global talent pool, highly distributed workforce, highly distributed supply chain, which, in itself, is a big area.
IoT has the potential to provide solutions to address all these requirements – from enabling interaction and integration for the grid, to imparting value to the customers with predictive maintenance and data insights for effective and efficient operations to enabling an eco-system for highly effective collaboration. However, it all boils down to the data quality and how effectively you are leveraging the data available to you.
As the need for completeness of data and quality became imperatives to allow better collaboration, better supply chain integration or better communication in the grid, their need assumed strategic importance and the legacies behind the systems seemed incomplete. So, how to work with this incomplete legacy data effectively is, I think, an internal challenge that many companies across industries face. Cost, as always, is another major aspect to consider while implementing IoT.
Technology Adoption and Best Practices
I can think of many use cases where the industry can apply a lot of advanced tools. However, one major challenge that I see with their application is they require either starting from a zero point where everything fits your assumption, or you must tune all the parameters on your own to ensure success. Self-aware tools that can determine when to do the right thing or the wrong thing require training, and that training, in turn, requires the master data to be in a shape that it can learn from and determine the correct action. And this is where, I think, the advanced tools become very reliant on a high-quality digital thread, high quality information, that can bring a lot of speed. But they can be expensive, and their adoption must justify the associated cost. It is thus very important to have a business view of where the challenges are, and what the solutions are. For an organization’s digital team, it is important to have a really solid look and reflection into the state of their existing infrastructure and use of tools.
It is also important to have a larger focal point when you are considering Industry 4.0 as a business transformation initiative. The parameters for the success must encompass short term as well as long term goals. I see a lot of challenges when companies try to measure the success of their Industry 4.0 initiatives in concrete and rigid small steps. There is a high risk for these companies of miscalculating their assessment by sub-optimizing the business and over-optimizing a step. And, this is where companies really have to look at their overall value chain and their overall business to determine where they derive their strengths from and from which processes, they derive the most value. Those are the places and processes where they must prioritize to implement Industry 4.0.
Selection of the digital tools and technology is also very important. Companies must have clarity of thought to define their needs and select the relevant technology accordingly. This requires a lot of knowledge about the technology, a lot of knowledge about how it works, and a lot of engagement with the business stakeholders to discuss pros and cons of the technology to do a feasibility analysis and testing. This is a tedious process and is a challenge in itself, this is why I say that commitment is the key that determines the success of your program.
Managing the Black Swans
Luckily, at Vestas, we had done a lot of digital things prior to COVID situation and we were in a fairly sound state, in terms of switching from office to remote work. And I am proud to say that we've done very well. Can we do more? Absolutely, we could be much better. And this continues to present a challenge to us. How do we manage a very highly distributed supply chain with many different local influences, local rules, different value propositions, a very distributed workforce? How do we really get access to the talent globally, and apply them into the right place globally? Especially when we're working remote is a continuing challenge. But I think we are on the right path and I think that just makes me very glad about the position that we are in today because of the steps that we took in past. For example, when we talk about remote support, at Vestas, it didn't come out of the COVID-19 situation, it was already planned to be there. And so, I think what makes me happiest is that the things that we had planned were appropriate at the time. We didn't really have to reform the plan, and that tells me that, we had forecast a lot of things fairly well as a business. We just pushed a lot harder through a difficult time.
We were able to keep the timeline for our newest product. Developing a new product in a new supply chain in a very different architecture and to be able to do that and keep the schedule in the middle of all the pandemic chaos is a remarkable achievement. I think it's just evident how committed our teams are and that they're working with the tools and infrastructure that allows them to perform and deliver despite the challenges. I think, if you're in good shape, and you're in control, you can pivot very quickly. If you're disciplined, you can change fast.
Business agility is an important virtue and agility requires proper preparation. To be able to respond to these black swan events, whether they're in the industry as an unpredicted event or whether they're external to us, it requires that we be agile. But, if a company lacks discipline and commitment to be agile, even if it performs well, I wouldn't bank on it to be robust in the face of a disturbance. I mean, stability doesn't mean quality. They're not the same. Stability in a lot of ways is a metric of success for some things, but it's not necessarily the cause of its own thing.
Role of IoT as a Business Enabler
I think the thing about IoT and its several applications such as digital twin, AR, VR, AI, ML is that we can understand the product, the business without being near the product or being in the business. Similarly, the collaboration tools are playing a huge role in streamlining global business operations. At Vestas too, we are leveraging these technologies to our benefit. We have been providing remote assisted support, where people can immediately interact with us in a very direct digital way and it is providing a lot of value and has helped us move very quickly. Moreover, this doesn't really require a lot of master data as it's more of a technical platform. Similarly, we've been leveraging technology innovation for a number of years for virtual design reviews but now we're using it to give digital tours of our products to customer. So, people can understand the product without having to be at it. We have been deploying augmented reality tools, so that people can really interact with our products without physically having them. We must enhance these technologies to interact in ways to engage all our senses. These technology advancements, however, also raise the customer expectations. When you start directly displaying data to customers in an interactive way, the expectation of data quality and accessibility goes way up, which is great. How a company responds to the high expectations differentiates the good from the bad.
Business Rapid Fire
Evolution or revolution?
Both, depending on the organizational priorities and market situation.
Strategy or Execution?
Execution – all your strategies amount to nothing if you do not have the will and discipline to execute them.
One takeaway from the new normal?
Discipline, commitment, and collaboration
2021 will be the year of continued success!
CASE STUDY
We have had a long-standing engagement with LTTS on a project called Material Traceability which helped us in moving our baseline information into a new, more standardized structure. And one of the impressive things that LTTS did in that project with quite a lot of skill was the ability to help us move the information from a fairly distributed legacy environment into a common framework effectively, that too, without interrupting the business while drastically improving the quality of master data. And, I think this is one of the key highlights of this project. You often hear people saying things like ‘the system doesn't work’ or ‘the process doesn't work’, or ‘this doesn't give me what I want’ and all of this is often rooted in simple fact that the master data and the setup around managing it is not good enough, so it made a huge impact when we were able to deliver on this front. Quality was another big focus of this engagement that we were able to address with good quality master data, it helped us in carrying the legacy forward and get things connected properly and get the information cleaned up. Lastly, cost management was another area where we were able to make necessary optimization with the help of LTTS and the master data management. To effectively manage the cost, one must know where the opportunities are, how the information is structured, so that one can link things together and make effective decisions, and good information structures, appropriately delivered to the user at the right time, allows one to make the best decisions.
Benefits
I like talking examples – so, let's say, that I was talking with somebody the other day and we weren't really referring to anything in particular and the person said, “Well, it seems very much like someone high up in the organization is really understanding our problems and coming with the solutions we really need, because it makes my work is easier.” And such conversations, I think, are a result of the benefits provided by our initiatives - so it's not any particular point that just kind of makes us feel good that we have a good roadmap and a good overall plan, but it is when they start referring to what is easier in their working life, that makes the entire effort worthwhile. Of course, there are tangible benefits too - intelligence and the workflows, and the little things that you can do with these that make the other things much more functional. Benefits in case of systems, they're easy to talk about, but they have a lot of out-of-the-box workflows. Yes, one can walk through them, but do they really have the little things in them that make the work smooth or easy for the users? For example, one of the things we did was to change how people review and approve content. And that simple change really opened up a whole new degree of agility for two reasons – one, the process helped them to determine ‘what to do’ in different situations and scenarios and secondly, it helped them to understand how people engage and work to achieve more, but ultimately, it maps to better management of the master data. So, today, we have full traceability to the history of the reviews. We know what comments people made, whether they said that this comment was important for causing it to work or was it just a comment that was a future opportunity for improvement. This was a very large step change for us, and, that really transformed how we do reviews. Just telling that the information is good does not suffice, one needs to know it beforehand whether it works in the field or doesn’t, and one needs to leverage all of that knowledge. So, it's a lot about how we engage the workforce with the information we have, to get the most value as early as we can, to get the highest level of quality as early as we can.
Virtues to look in a Partnership
Skillset
LTTS brings in a lot of domain expertise, and a lot of knowledge on how to use the tools and how the tool and the data should be properly structured to enable the users to do what they really must do, and not what they said they wanted to do, to deliver high quality business results. The LTTS team brought a lot of that expertise to the table and we’re greatly appreciative of having a high-quality team with the right behavioral skill set. You know as they always say - you don't hire for skills; you hire for behavior. And if you have good behavior and you have the appropriate skills, you can do a whole lot more. So, we had that nice mix in the team and that allowed us to do a lot. As for the technical skills are concerned the team worked seamlessly and effectively with industry standard tools.
Problem Solving
Through the years we have worked on large transformational projects with LTTS where the team had to use the tools and technology differently for custom results. And really, regardless of the level of training you apply to people, it doesn't fully sink in until you really start executing. And at that point, the LTTS team was very willing and very supportive to engage with the business users, and to switch from this development mode into a hyper care mode, where they started directly interacting with the business users and explaining to them how things are built, how things should work, how to solve problems and where they needed to change. And that was simply excellent! I think the other part of it was where there were some unforeseen bumps in the road in terms of master data or process that we quickly pivoted and solved with some technical developments. The team proposed some really simple things that were put in place, but they were very intelligent and much easier to manage.
Expertise and Exposure
Well, I think LTTS brings in the relevant knowledge that we don't possess, to the table. We can’t cover all the areas as we don't have unlimited experience across the breadth of industries or, we don't have experience in all the available tools and technologies in the industry. We engage with someone like LTTS as they are engaged across so many different businesses and have exposure to and experience in so many different technologies that the way they look at things can be a bit broader than the way we look at some things. And, that can open our view to some things, and we can then bring our expertise to the fore and then find a proper solution by combining both the approaches. I think that's a lot of value in this methodology and when we talk about the skills and behaviors, that's also a very big differentiator between companies as the right culture, and how people work and how people engage and communicate is incredibly important. Especially in the time of this COVID pandemic, when everyone is working remotely, it gets very strained and very difficult to communicate and be efficient when the baseline of understanding or the baseline of work culture, and how we approach problems is different in a significant way. And it’s a very key focus specially today, compared to a few years ago, where you could gather and iron things out. Earlier, you could observe the body language that communicates a whole lot, but now a lot of it is gone and we have to rely much, much more on really solid collaboration skills and LTTS without doubt does a brilliant job at that.
Business Challenge
Rigid systems based on manual documentation was a huge operational hindrance at Vestas. They had humongous information stored in Word files and data access, data consistency, data analysis and decision making were thus painfully slow processes.
Tommy Rasmussen
Vestas operates in three broad business categories – first is maintenance and maintenance agreement models with full-service contracts, second is the information diagnostics and business intelligence and the third category is part sales. Adoption of Industry 4.0 was thus an imperative across all these three categories to improve internal operations as well as customer service. Few of the key challenges that Vestas aimed to mitigate with Industry 4.0 adoption were:
Foundation
Product representation throughout the value chain creates a foundation to work with product data in very unique ways. Vestas worked with LTTS to integrate their PLM system with their ERP and CAD systems to define boundaries between systems and right tool chains and standardization of master and design data as per UNSPC/ECCMA. This allowed Vestas to trace the material used in their products which was documented in physical form but not associated or tagged with a product structure. With the introduction of the digital thread through integration of PLM, Vestas is now able to create IoT applications, mixed reality applications to track, monitor, and trace these components. This has helped Vestas on multiple fronts such as:
Value Add
Vestas had three key objectives - the first one was to determine material traceability, the second objective was to increase the level of utilization by bringing up the level of information that they had, and then the third objective was to disseminate that information across the organization for better use.
The digital PLM thread across ERP and CAD systems helped them achieve all three objectives and helped them in ways beyond that. On the maintenance front, it allowed Vestas to be more competitive by driving down the cost. With S-BOM, they have an intelligent structure that gives much more foresight into parts traceability that helps them reduce the amount of times their service engineers have to visit the site to validate and procure the parts. It not only helps in faster procurement of the individual parts but allows Vestas to offer maintenance bundles and service sales to their customers leading to an alternate revenue source. In diagnostics, utilizing and leveraging the simulation models along with digital twin helps in simplifying the troubleshooting process and providing the prescriptions for resolving the issues in a much more streamlined and accurate way.
LTTS Our Partner in Success
One of the key things to work with a consultancy like LTTS is that we get a full-scale implementation team. It is like having a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of consultancy. It helps us seamlessly transcend various stages of maturity of a solution or product and move from concept into fully implemented ERP solution. And, I think that makes them a key ingredient in the recipe of our success. Our partnership with LTTS goes much beyond the ability to scale – yes we can easily ramp up when required but more importantly it is the assurance of getting the person with right skill-set as and when required without worrying about re-education of the newly inducted resource or implications of changing the team composition.
One thing that we have done really well with the partnerships is implementation of the best practices. The fact that we get exposure to the learnings of different companies across different industries makes the implementation more mature, especially on the PLM side.
We have a long-term engagement with LTTS, and we have had proven success with them on multiple projects. Over the time, this has built mutual trust which goes a long way in giving us the confidence that they will solve things if they have committed to it. Sometimes we also run into unforeseen issues but, we can still count on them to provide apt solutions to complex problems.
