What started with a mobile SAP solution for service teams, has developed into a comprehensive software solution for the entire service department of the Aurich wind turbine company. Their teams of technicians take care of yearly maintenance cycles and turbine modifications, while at the same time they need to be available to repair problems at short notice. Because technicians spend a lot of time in the field, a direct SAP connection and mobile allocation of work orders on end devices is particularly useful.

Resource Scheduling with ClickSchedule

To provide customers with the best possible service, Enercon maintains a network of service stations from which technicians begin their daily operations. Each team consists of two people who, depending on their operational area, have different qualifications. Each technician’s qualifications are stored in SAP which, with the help of ClickSchedule, will update their working schedules daily. “In choosing this software, the decisive factor was the high degree of automatization” says Michael Wessendorf, the CEO of Wessendorf Software + Consulting. The automatic scheduling process concludes at noon, at which point the assigned orders are transferred to the technicians’ notebooks. The dispatchers can reschedule and integrate last minute incidents before the assignments are sent. The technicians then receive all the necessary data about the asset and work assignment via an ergonomic interface, which also allows all the necessary materials to be loaded onto the vehicles before the workday starts. To support this process, specific maintenance schedules were created in SAP for all wind energy asset types. In addition, technical documentation about the assets are available on the notebooks. To prevent unnecessary turbine visits, cyclical maintenance work is combined with other, non-critical work assignments. After completion, the recorded data is transferred back to SAP and added to the corresponding contracts.

Incidents via the Scada-System

The Workforce Management Solution also handles incidents entered in Scada, which forwards the encrypted data directly to the central SAP system. Courtesy of the service cockpit, the in-house employees always have an overview of the total number of incidents in their service area. Based on the priority level, the required qualifications, as well as the time and location availability of the technician, the work is automatically scheduled.

The maintenance work is planned in a correspondingly efficient manner at Enercon. Not least because of these measures was the company able to achieve a record 98.5% average availability in the past few years. Furthermore, monitoring systems identify which assets may potentially be at risk of falling below the agreed service level, ahead of time. This allows special measures to be put in place to increase their availability. As such, the technical condition of all Enercon assets is very high.

Service quality is a factor for growth

Enercon was able to considerably increase the transparency of its service calls with the help of analysis in SAP. Through work bundling and more effective planning, the amount of time spent traveling has noticeably decreased. Furthermore, managers always have up-to-date information about the maintenance status of every asset. “Our dispatchers can react a lot faster in case of shortages, whether that is because of personnel, last minute reparation orders or an asset potentially falling short of its service level agreement” summarizes Rainer Schwieters, Enercon customer service department project manager.