Life as a Digitalization Expert: The New Generation of Service Warriors
Traditionally, the gearbox is a mechanical component designed and built to operate across a range of conditions with a lifetime of many years.
The evolution of digital technologies and connectivity along with the data they provide, now gives the opportunity to target and optimize gearbox maintenance services with the introduction of proactive and predictive maintenance. This transformation brings the ZF product portfolio to the digital era.
We interviewed Mihail, Alice and Christian – members of ZF’s digitalization team: entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds united around the desire to use their tech know-how to help the world benefit from affordable renewable energy.
The Digitalization Mindset – the Sky Is the limit
The ZF Wind Power digitalization team is very diverse group drawn from different cultures and backgrounds, engineers, data scientists, interns, business developers and many others. What does this mean for the way they work and the value the team brings? “Our unique value is understanding the possibilities, advantages and benefits of digital tools, which gives us new perspectives on the data we collect with our customers and partners. Combine this with our extensive inhouse domain expertise and the sky becomes the limit,” says Mihail Ivanov, Product Manager Digitalization. “We use this agile mindset in our work and deliver value as a team. What is exciting is the fact that we dare to fail and empower each other to learn, improve and move ahead,” adds Alice Feldmann, Data Analytics Engineer.
Digitalization - Enriching Data With Analytics
During their work, data scientists must deal with millions of data points in different formats and languages. How do they do that?
“From an analytics perspective we expect structured and consistent data, but often the data is scattered and not standardized. Designing an automated pipeline starting from raw data is an essential step towards reliable analytics. For example, we consume various internal information sources, enrich it with customer data and wrangle it to serve as input for predictions. Our team is even capable to utilize data from 20 years ago and use it with our modern automated analytics,” says Alice.
What you do with data is crucial. The digitalization team has top notch expertise when it comes to deploying analytics models that convert data into valuable customer insights.
"We are always on the hunt to develop and continuously improve our analytics. We evolve over time and incorporate new tools and techniques to serve the needs of our customers," explains Christian Kranz, Data Analytics Engineer. The concept of digitalization is an emerging trend across multiple sectors and a vast number of technologies and best practices are available. “The challenge is to find the perfect blend between the benefits from partners and suppliers in our eco-system and our unique and proprietary domain knowledge. We maintain close contact with our customers and often involve them in the early stages of new developments to gain their feedback and incorporate improvements early in the process,” continues Christian.
Delivering Customer Value
The new generation of ZF Wind Power service warriors are customer centric and challenge the status quo to further reduce the cost of energy. What are the tangible benefits?
ZF Services Powered by Analytics help customers optimize their costs, their business planning and increase the availability of their fleet through proactive and predictive maintenance. The team utilizes alert-based recommendations to enable fast return to operation in case of gearbox issues and support with lifetime extensions. “In one case a customer with 100 wind turbines 12 years of age was able to benefit from savings in spare parts inventory, reduce unplanned field inspections by 50% and shorten the lead time to repair from 8 weeks to 1 week,” explains Mihail. The key to success is the human aspect of digitalization.
ZF Wind Power’s service warriors harness the power of digitalization and go the extra mile to deliver tailored solutions with optimized value for customers.
