Process Innovation
In today’s wind energy market, adaptibility to new requirements from customers is key. Constantly increasing requirements on capacity throughput and quality levels have to be fulfilled. Therefore process innovation is a must to support the business case, certainty to customers. The process innovations at Sif are realized in different ways.
- Continuous improvement by every employee at Sif: we encourage employees to step forward with their improvement ideas. We differentiate between the ‘no-brainer’ level and the TIP level. With TIP we improve by forming small improvement teams, which are facilitated by TIP coaches. TIP coaches train the members of the teams to work according to a structured improvement method (the Sif way) and thus creating awareness of a structured way of working.
- Expert-level improvements by high level specialists, focusing on newly available production methods and technologies, that can be integrated in our current production.
- Process improvements by Six Sigma certified employees.
- No-brainers and TIPs form a broad wave of improvements within Sif. Expert-level and Six Sigma improvements are smaller in quantity, but focus on breakthrough improvements.
The reduction of costs of offshore wind energy is primarily driven by innovations and efficiency improvements.
The industry continues to find ways to increase the power generation of offshore wind farms. Currently, a generating capacity of 15 MW per turbine is close to reality. Sif tracks the latest developments in turbine technology closely and investigates exactly what effect this will have on size, manufacturability and cost of foundations.
