Industries - Wind Turbine Installation

Planning, Scheduling, and Progress tracking of Wind Turbine Installation is Challenging but also Critical to Delivering on Time.

With Tactplan, overcoming these challenges becomes easy. Below, we provide an example of an installation schedule involving 32 turbines. To the left, you can see how the schedule looks when printed from traditional scheduling software such as MS Project or Primavera. To the right is exactly the same data in Tactplan. The example project is divided into three crane lines across two mountain ranges.

After learning about takt time planning, you will immediately look for optimisations in your production, and understand that if the schedule has white space, no task is planned at that location at that time, so here there is scope for improvement. It is easy to identify in the Tactplan screenshot below, while the traditional schedule will not give you any idea at all.

CRUCUIAL CHALLENGES

Challenge with Traditional Scheduling Tools

Impacts of Unpredictable Weather Patterns

Consequences of ever-changing weather conditions are impossible to overview.

Challenges in Monitoring

Progress tracking from various sites never reaches HQ, making it impossible to support the on-site team.

Misalignment in Construction Logistics

The flow of component delivery, crane capacity and workforce is not aligned.

Construction workers working on a wind turbine

Tracking and Agreement

Tracking and agreement on Extension of Time (EoT).

Consequences of Changes in Delivery

The consequences of changes in weather conditions or delivery plans are impossible to overview in the traditional schedule. In Tactplan, the location flow of deliveries can easily be changed, and you can see the consequences of the following activities on the locations and decide whether they have to follow the new delivery plan, or if it is not possible to change to overall takt. To save time, it is important that the flow of component delivery, crane capacity and manpower is aligned.

Daily Mobile Progress Tracking

Working in a cloud-based solution like Tactplan makes it easy to share the schedule between the site and your back office. Tactplan integrates seamlessly with the mobile progress monitoring solution Tactplan Mobile, so you can easily do progress tracking and report changes or causes of delay.

This way, your back office can assist your site manager in keeping the plan up to date and document the consequences of any changes. By tracking actual progress from sites around the world, you gain a complete overview of your project’s performance and identify issues before it is too late.

Align Delivery, Crane Capacity, and Workforce

By standardising the workflow of wind turbine installations, everyone involved will know exactly what to do and when and where to do it. Any learning from any project can be used to optimise all future projects in the company project portfolio. With a location-based schedule, you can align component delivery takt with the erection order, and make sure you have the right workforce available.

Adaption to Extension of Time

Extensions of Time (EoT) are natural parts of delivering wind turbine projects as the forces of nature cannot be controlled and unforeseen thing happens such as breakdown or late delivery of components.Oftentimes, a delay does not delay all on-site activities and it may be possible to continue work elsewhere on-site – however, this represents a change of plan, and if this change is not incorporated into the plan, the plan is effectively redundant.This small task of continuously updating the remaining plan based on the actual progress of the project may seem manageable in theory, however, in practice, it quickly becomes a time-consuming task and is therefore often deprioritized or neglected – meaning that many projects around the globe are effectively progressing without a plan.

A truck transporting one of the three wind turbine blades

"I recommend all students within construction to complete the Academy. It provides a thorough introduction to the Location-based method and a basic understanding of how planning in construction is approached".

Jon Lerche

Ph.D. - Lead Management Consultant

Learn this innovative method using the Tactplan Academy

Learn more about Tactplan Academy

Become 20% faster than your competitors!

Get ahead of your competitors today by utilising Tactplan’s scheduling features to optimise your time on site. Get a free trial today and a personalised introduction.

Get a free trial

Construction crew standing outside with a great overview of their plan