Vestas: Realizing the Digital Thread with PTC Solutions

Vestas, the world's leader in sustainable energy solutions, is reshaping the design and development of wind turbines through a product-centric approach. Vestas is on a multiyear journey to enable a digital thread between geographically distributed, multidisciplinary teams. These efforts are helping teams work collaboratively with customers through updated and reliable product information.

Let’s examine how Vestas seamlessly innovates wind turbine development across engineering, manufacturing, and service disciplines with enterprise-wide PLM.

Engineering: Powering innovation with a product-centric approach

At Vestas, the digital thread begins with the engineering stage. This stage focuses on developing new methods, using teams with diverse expertise across different locations, and collaborating with partners and customers. Vestas is committed to maintaining high quality without compromising performance, cost, development speed, or sustainability. Using each product's latest and most trusted information is essential to the manufacturer’s success.

Engineering innovation at Vestas is getting a huge boost from the intelligent platform architecture enabled by PTC Windchill. This approach allows for a modular product architecture with flexible configuration and customization, quickly addressing specific customer and site requirements. It divides an engineering design into replaceable components and subsystems, enabling Vestas to scale and add design and configurations easily while reducing delivery time.

Another essential feature is using model-based enterprise (MBE) and model-based definition (MBD) practices with PTC’s CREO. Using CREO, Vestas creates 3D models supplemented with product and manufacturing information (PMI) annotations and other specification documents that capture design intent. This approach aims to make 3D models the single source of truth under the MDE principle, thus streamlining the product delivery process, minimizing errors, and ensuring product quality.

Learn more about how Vestas accelerates innovation in engineering.

Manufacturing: Driving efficiency and quality on the shop floor

Vestas' manufacturing practices prioritize digital technologies from product design to production planning. This improves first-pass yield, collaboration, and efficiency. Cost reduction efforts focus on minimizing scrap and rework, lowering risk, and reducing failure points by streamlining manual handovers and lead times.

Vestas’ digital thread linking Vestas MES, Windchill PLM, ERP, and SAP is proving critical to their pursuit of manufacturing excellence. This allows Vestas to trace products from design to production, conduct full-lifecycle analysis, and share data with designers for quicker resolution to design changes, improved quality, and faster time to market.

Additionally, quality inspection is enhanced through artificial intelligence and computer vision technology embedded in the PTC Vuforia Step Check solution. This enables more accurate and scalable quality inspections, saving Vestas time and costs.

Learn more about how Vestas accelerates innovation in manufacturing.

Service: Easier field service operations with PTC solutions

Vestas operates more than 57,000 wind turbines in 78 countries with a team of over 12,000 service technicians. To maintain its position as a leading sustainable energy solutions provider, Vestas utilizes a digital platform to manage information services for its products, systems, and components.

To create interactive service documentation, Vestas uses PTC solutions to create and optimize service operations, including mechanical, electronic, and software designs, graphics, images, and text. When a component is changed, all relevant documentation is automatically updated.

Vestas also employs PTC’s Vuforia Expert Capture for multi-stakeholder connection during turbine assembly, testing, inspection, and certification at customer sites. Vuforia Expert Capture enables stakeholders to access 3D or 2D data and associated metadata to minimize mistakes and downtime during on-site turbine assembly.

Learn more about how Vestas accelerates innovation in service.

Bringing the digital thread to life with Windchill

By leveraging Windchill PLM, Vestas can connect data, processes, and people across the product lifecycle. This allows them to manage product data and configurations, automate workflows and change management, integrate with other enterprise systems, and deliver product information effectively. This approach enhances the company's ability to drive digital innovation, reduce time to market, and improve the quality of its sustainable energy solutions.