Show notes
This week's spotlight explores SkySpecs' solution to the wind industry's repair vendor management crisis with executives Dan Partin and Noah Fabes. The discussion covers how SkySpecs helps wind farm operators handle vendor shortages and quality control through their comprehensive vendor management services, which includes vetting contractors, overseeing repairs, and streamlining project management.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. We're shining a spotlight on a critical issue that's causing headaches for wind farm operators across the globe, repair vendor management. So you imagine this scenario, your wind farm is running smoothly when suddenly a turbine goes offline.
You need repairs fast, but your usual vendor is book solid, and we've heard this all year. Days turn into weeks and you're losing money with every passing hour. Unfortunately, this isn't a hypothetical or a recent industry survey revealed a starling statistic. 40% of operators frequently face delays or increased costs due to repair vendor storage.
During peak periods, like the summertime of the United States. In today's episode, we're diving deep into this repair vendor crisis, walks for why there aren't enough technicians to meet the man, how this shortage is impacting wind farm operations, and most importantly. What can be done about it? To help us unpack this complex issue, we're joined by two experts from SkySpecs.
Our first guest is Dan Parton, VP of Strategic Account Management at SkySpecs. Dan brings extensive experience in the wind industry, Dan Parton Dan Parton focusing on developing and maintaining clean air. Key client relationships, his role is crucial in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by wind farm operators, particularly in the area of repair vendor management.
And our second guest is Noah Faves, senior product Manager at SkySpecs. Noah's focused on workflow optimization and team leadership plays a key role in developing solutions that streamline and repair vendor management processes. His experience in creating robust solutions for previously unmet customer needs is particularly relevant to our discussion today.
Guys, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having us.
Noah Faves: Thank you.
Allen Hall: This is probably problem number one in the United States at the minute. I'm glad you guys are tackling it. Oh my gosh. What a disaster. There's not enough technicians that are all tied up. If there are technicians. Somebody's already locked him up months before, so you don't even have access, forget about calling him because they're not going to even pick up the phone.
This has led to a crisis, such that, I think Joel and I have seen this a couple of times this summer, where people, operations are starting to get a little bit desperate. And are bringing in crews that probably aren't qualified to do the work that they're supposed to do. Not to say they're not technically capable.
They probably are technically capable. It's all the periphery. Yeah. The PPE, showing up on time. All those things, booking their hours properly. That little stuff.
Joel Saxum: Would you run into, when you have that issue, you run into one of my biggest pet peeves in operations in general? And it's the cost of poor quality.
Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Cost of poor quality can be put together as did they do a bad repair or something like that? Yeah. You got to go back and fix it. That's a cost, but that's easy to quantify. But cost of poor quality can also be like, they showed up with garbage trucks or something, and they were getting flat tires all the time because they had six ply tires or some really silly things, but it can, all of those issues can compound an already demanding problem.
Or, the biggest one we ran into this summer was people not using PPE. That's just. Quite silly. So what that does is it gets you removed from site. That's what's gonna happen and even more of a reason to call you guys. So this is a new thing. This is something like as it sits usually you have wind turbine operator or ISP or someone looking into whatever their procurement department tells them and they may turn to procurement and say, procurement, any blades And procurement has found whoever's going to be the cheapest or whoever has gone through their hurdles to get through their procurement system and say, Oh here's four guys from these people.
They show up on site. You don't know who they are. You don't know, you don't know what their background is, these kinds of things. There, there's issues all the time with this. So there will, Is space, was space, you guys are starting to fill it right now, of someone to come in and be that middleman, be that not necessarily procurement, but someone that will vet people, someone that will find these, and you're, what you're doing is you're just expanding on SkySpecs opportunities to partner and to be that close partner with your clients.
So how did the, this is a question I have, like, how does this conversation happen within SkySpecs of you know what we should do? We should do contractor management,
Dan Parton: how does that work? It's a really interesting story, so I think it comes back to how we try to position ourselves in the industry and how we try to provide a platform that allows customers to have greater transparency and visibility into what's going on at their wind farms.
And I love the idea of, loss of quality and tracking quality, because that's what we're trying to do. But what we discovered was you can build a platform, but you still need somebody to use it. And we found for a lot of our customers, they're really lacking a lot of the time, effort, resources, really, to go in and Keep an eye on the vendors and really understand what's happening out in the field.
And they were coming to us not asking not only can we help with their decision making and their prioritization, but can we also help with their management of some of these vendors and essentially, yeah, exactly. Can we outsource some of this to you because we really don't have time to do it ourselves.
And it presented an interesting dilemma and opportunity for us. And we thought, that's really interesting. Let's give it a shot and I'll see how we can do and let's leverage some of our own tools, our expertise. And see if we can find areas where we can deliver value for those customers.
I think so far it's been successful and we've been able to do that. We've grown and we've developed and we've identified ways where we can scale that effectively. It's been a tremendous journey so far.
Allen Hall: What kind of pain have you seen for some of the people that call you up? What desperate situations have you been in?
Noah Faves: They're usually mostly desperate situations, I would say. And in many cases oftentimes Maybe they are under an O& M service contract or something like that and have been struggling to get the level of transparency into how repair projects are going or repair's not getting done at all.
And they come to us and ask for help.
Allen Hall: Is it just because they know something should be happening on these turbines, but it's like day 30 out of the five day project? And they're like, what's going on?
Dan Parton: I think it's it's an interesting array of pain that you see. So I think a common one is just surprise damage on their blades.
They're not really anticipating or budgeted for, and they're scrambling at the mid season or end of year to find crews availability, as you mentioned earlier at the onset, that's a big one. The, their usual crew is unavailable or the teams that they usually work with are unavailable.
Budgeting pain is a major one, obviously.
Noah Faves: Yeah, I'm looking for out of the box solutions on, potentially recurring defects and things like that.
Joel Saxum: Complex damages. Alan and I, we run into that quite often. We're in the lightning world, right? That's our main job. So when we talk to people, lightning is one of those things where That looked like a pinhole in the damage.
And then we started opening the blade up and all of a sudden we're a hundred, 120, 000 in. That, that crew that's there doing that repair, they may have actually been contracted to come and do six other cat three repairs. And now they've spent their whole budget on doing one, or a cat three, cat four, something of that sort.
Either way, those other repairs still need to get done, but now we need manpower. We need resources to get out there. The solution then can be, call you guys.
Allen Hall: What does that look like? I want to understand, when do I pick up the phone and call SkySpecs? Is it sort of Joel's scenario of they just identified a Cat 5 when they thought there was a Cat 2 or 3?
Or is it, they have so much work and they just can't find anybody competent to do it? Or is it both? I'm going to call them right now and say, Hey,
Joel Saxum: next spring we need this all done, figure it out for us. And
Dan Parton: What does that look like?