The logistics and supply chain management of maintenance is a very critical undertaking in the offshore wind energy industry.
A failure to deliver properly maintain services is adversely affecting the wind farm’ availability and thereby reducing the ability to produce as well as harming the profitability of its operators.
To organize the maintenance logistics for offshore wind farms has received a keen interest at XELLZ B.V., the Project Logistics Management company. XELLZ has started to design its “24shore” services with the state-of-the-art of maintenance logistics management that is required and needed in the offshore wind energy industry worldwide.
The new XELLZ service, 24shore, has designed a classification program involving three levels of strategic, tactical and operational decision-making through their in-house developed projeXsmart® application. The strategic level deals with decisions regarding wind farm initial logistics design for reliable delivering, location and workload management of the maintenance equipment, like cranes, work-barges, guard boats etc. The tactical level embraces the spare parts inventory management, maintenance logistics support organization, and all decisions regarding purchase or lease of maintenance resources.
The operational level includes scheduling of maintenance material logistics tasks, routing of vessels, and measuring the performance. This is done through XELLZ’ Project Control Center which is based in the greater Amsterdam area in The Netherlands. This PCC is taking the control of all its project related and offshore related maintenance material logistics.
Study indicate that the strategic decisions of maintenance material and resources logistics have received stunning results in on-time performance and shortening of wind farm downtime. The study also shows that the three categories of [1] maintenance logistics strategy, [2] maintenance logistics support organization and [3] scheduling of maintenance logistics tasks are the most addressed areas which have a significant impact on the overall maintenance performance of offshore wind farms.
More information on 24shore can be found at www.24shore.com
