Narrative

Wind Turbine Site - Identifying a Process Gap

The customer is reviewing the day’s productivity report and Wind Turbine #4
reads the following excerpt...

performing at 30% less

productivity than
The customer contacts the GE Site Manager:

previous week.
Recommendation from
“Hi, this is Avery from Blue Canyon Wind Farm, we would Site monitoring team is
like to request a standard service maintenance call on our
GE customer Wind Turbine #4” to perform standard
maintenance service
check.

“Hi Avery, good to hear from you. Checking our installed base record, it seems this Wind
Turbine is approaching a recommended service date. Let me schedule a technician to make a
site visit. I will let you know when the technician will be available. “

The GE Site Manager thinks to himself...

I can check the wind farm and Turbine site information in our installed base database, but I just
realized that I have no easy way to record the information from the customer service call and I am
not able to link the service request to a customer contract. Let me try to capture all required
information to pass on to the technician.

The GE Site Manager then receives a call from a different customer about an emergency
outage, he spends the rest of the day troubleshooting to get the wind turbine back up and
running.

One day passes GE Site

Manager

The GE Site Manager contacts the GE Technician, after reviewing wall calendars highlighting
upcoming service assignments and technician vacation days:

“Hi, Taylor, I have a new assignment for you. Wind Turbine #4 at the Blue Canyon Wind Farm is
coming due for standard maintenance, and they are reporting some deterioration in the
performance this week.”

“Great, this will be my first visit to the Blue Canyon site.

Unfortunately, I will be on vacation early next week (sorry, I forgot to add it to your wall calendar), but
I should be able to perform the service on Thursday – just need to confirm parts availability for the
standard maintenance servicing.

Do you know if any specific issues were reported?”

GE Technician

“No, I did not ask Avery if there were any other concerns. I believe I wrote down what was
reported.

Of course, so many other activities were happening that day, I might have missed something. I’ll
contact the warehouse to put in the parts order today.”

The GE Site Manager contacts the Warehouse:

“Hi Toni, I have a new parts order for you. We need a standard service maintenance kit for the GE Site
Blue Canyon Wind Turbine #4.

Manager
GE customer
Taylor plans to be on site in a few days to complete the service. Do you have parts available?”

“Hmmm, I am not sure which Turbine model that is. Let me check the records and I’ll go confirm we
have inventory available.”

Several hours later….

GE Parts
Warehouse The warehouse calls the GE Site Manager:

“It looks like we need a re-order on one of the required parts – I’ll put in the purchase order – should be
able to ship all parts tomorrow to wind farm site.”

The GE Service Technician arrives at wind farm the next week and is unable to locate the parts kit.

Taylor must contact the parts warehouse and talk with the local wind farm logistics team before
finally locating the shipment at the turbine site down the road which had a similar but not exact
address.

The GE Service Technician completes standard maintenance, but notices there is another part
requiring repair – due to the age of the wind turbine, this is a known replacement, but the
customer service records were not consolidated, so this needed repair went undetected.

The Technician makes a note of the future repair required on the information and heads home
knowing it will be a full few days ahead in order to catch up on repairs that built up while on GE Technician
vacation.

Several days later, the service repair information is completed by the technician and provided to
the GE Site Manager who prepares the full documentation and sends it across to Finance for
billing / invoicing the customer.

The GE Finance manager reviews the documentation and sees both the standard service maintenance
and an additional part repair. The standard cost for the additional part repair is not readily available,
so the Finance Manager must contact the Sales team to confirm the expected cost and margin on the
repair and then include it on the invoice to the customer.

The Finance Manager looks up the part shipment to find the customer site address and mails the
invoice and the documentation to the customer.

GE Finance

The GE customer receives the invoice and immediately calls the GE Site Manager.

“Hey this Avery from Blue Canyon Wind Farms, I have just received the invoice for our Wind
Turbine #4 repair, and I can not approve for payment. There is an additional service repair on the
invoice that has not yet been completed, also you should know that the address the invoice was
sent to was not the correct “bill to” location – I had to have the other site hand deliver it to my
location.” GE customer

“Yes, I see, looking at the documentation, I improperly included a future repair on the current invoice.
My sincere apologies, let me get this corrected and send you the proper invoice – also , let me take
down your bill to site information so we can correct our customer record as well.”

The GE Site Manager relays the invoice correction to the Finance Manager, who must issue a credit
memo and re-bill for the proper amount. The invoice is re-sent to the customer, who approves and
payment is issued to GE 60 days after the initial service call and 45 days after the repair is completed.

GE Site
Manager N ote: normal customer payment terms are 30 days.