Wind Turbine Installation
Location Based Scheduling will get you ahead of your competitors
Outpace your competitors with location-based scheduling
Planning, scheduling, and progress tracking of wind turbine installation is challenging but also critical to delivering on time. Some companies still rely on a spreadsheet or traditional scheduling software and it often ends in challenges like:
1.
Consequences of ever-changing weather conditions are impossible to overview.
2.
Progress tracking from various sites never reach HQ, making support to the on-site team impossible.
3.
Flow of component delivery, crane capacity, and workforce is not aligned.
4.
Tracking and agreement on Extension of Time (EoT).
The Solution
With Tactplan overcoming these challenges becomes easy. Below we have given an example of an installation schedule of 32 Turbines. To the left, you can see how the schedule looks when printed from traditional scheduling software like MS Project or Primavera. To the right is the exact same data in Tactplan. The example project is divided into 3 crane lines across two mountain ranges.
After learning Takt Time planning you will immediately look for optimization in the production and understand that if the schedule has white space, no task is planned on that location, at that time, so there is room for improvement. It can immediately be identified in the screenshot from Tactplan below, but you have no idea from the traditional schedule.
Gantt
14 X A3 Print
Location – based Scheduling
1 Page
1. Consequences of changes in delivery
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 it is not feasible to change to overall tact.
To save time it is important that the low of component delivery, crane capacity, and manpower is aligned.
2. Daily Mobile Progress Tracking
When working in a cloud-based solution like Tactplan, it becomes easy to share the schedule between the site and your back office. Tactplan integrates seamlessly with the mobile progress monitoring solution Exicute, 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 changes. By tracking actual progress from sites around the world you get the full overview of your project’s performance and identify issues before it is too late.
3. Align delivery, crane capacity, and workforce
By standardizing 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 optimize all future projects in the company project portfolio. With a location-based schedule, you can align the tact of component delivery with the erection order and make sure you have the right workforce available.
4. 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.
Get Ahead of the Competition
According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 30 million jobs in renewable energy and energy efficiency must be created by 2025, rising to 60 million by 2030.
Assuming the delivery of planned investments, this net-zero workforce, the size of a large nation, will require the project delivery sector to grow its workforce at roughly twice the rate as it did in the five years leading up to the global outbreak of COVID-19.
Leaders have to prepare to scale business in order to accommodate the net-zero workforce and increased demand for renewable energy project deliveries.
Backed by Research
Jon Lerche is an industry expert in Lean Construction and has researched the impact of implementing Takt Time Planning and Location-based Scheduling in wind turbine installation, his conclusions are clear →
If you are interested in his research you can follow him here: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/jon-lerche(29f82376-38f8-4434-8faa-b5fefd6b2cb9)/publications.html
And download some of his scientific papers: https://pure.au.dk/portal/files/185869627/JL_PHD_2020.pdf
“We used the location-based method to identify risks and resource issues in construction schedules provided by a contract partner. Some areas were overbooked, so craftsmen had to wait for others to finish, while other tasks were understaffed and not following the pace of other tasks. Identifying these risks allowed the management team to make decisions around the staffing and the sequence through the work areas leading to increasing labor efficiency.”
Discover the Technology
Using location-based takt-time planning for the wind turbine installation has never been this easy and flexible. The technology ensures that planning and progress monitoring of your project becomes a core business support.
The learning curve of a wind turbine installation project varies from project to project as various factors influence the on-site learning and efficiency: personnel (management, experience, language), site conditions (snow, rain, temperature), and many more.
Regardless of if you are looking to factor this into the project planning or trying to calculate the effect or monetary consequences of disruptions or scope changes during the project period – it is quite impossible to do without valid and reliable data.
Challenged or inspired?
Whether you are looking to strengthen your position in the global market by becoming a data-driven and learning organization or utilizing location-based scheduling for the wind turbine installation, or you find yourself in a costly dispute or litigation regarding project overruns and extensions of time documentation – our experienced team of consultants are here to help!
Explore our experienced team in Location-Based Scheduling here.
Kristian Birch Pedersen
CEO and Founder
M.Sc. (CivEng), Master of IT, PhD
+45 53 55 59 19
kbp@exigo.dk