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March 03, 2021

Siemens Gamesa fuels business growth and cultivates a data-driven mindset with Microsoft Industry Solutions

Microsoft Industry Solutions guided Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy through a digital and cultural transformation that included upskilling its people, changing its culture, and becoming more self-sufficient in managing new, technology-based business processes. It was a far cry from the narrower move to the cloud that the manufacturer first envisioned—but one it readily adopted when Microsoft showed Siemens Gamesa how the bolder initiative could not just support scalability, but fuel genuine business growth.

Siemens Gamesa

“In Microsoft Industry Solutions, we have far more than a vendor. We’re allied with a company that brings holistic experience and expertise in technology and an understanding of how we must change to best use that technology.”

Sven Heitsch, Chief Digital Officer, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy didn’t become one of the world’s leading manufacturers in the renewable energy sector by failing to seize opportunities. So, when the company needed to consolidate technology platforms from its four predecessor companies, Siemens Gamesa didn’t stop with platform consolidation. It set out to meld green energy and digital technology to fuel business growth, manage wind turbines more effectively for its customers, and inspire entirely new, data-driven services.

“We didn’t just want to be more independent of legacy technology, we wanted to shape the future of our company and our industry,” says Sven Heitsch, Chief Digital Officer at Siemens Gamesa. To help ensure their success, Heitsch and his colleagues turned to Microsoft Industry Solutions.

“In Microsoft Industry Solutions, we have far more than a vendor,” says Heitsch. “We’re allied with a company that brings holistic experience and expertise in technology and an understanding of how we must change to best use that technology—how we can upskill our people, change our culture, and ultimately run our new ways of doing business ourselves.” 

Adopting a more flexible, data-driven mindset

Moving from on-premises datacenters to the cloud and hosting an ambitious series of workloads on the new environment were key to achieving platform consolidation and the increased scalability that Siemens Gamesa sought. However, before the manufacturer could move full throttle on that consolidation, Microsoft helped Siemens Gamesa to reorient its culture from a focus on traditional engineering to a more flexible, data-driven mindset.  

“We have smart people and Microsoft helped us show them what they needed to do differently and how to inspire them to use data in new ways,” says Ulrik Henriksen, Head of Fleet Performance and Diagnostic Center at Siemens Gamesa. “Microsoft highlighted what it takes to succeed on a journey of digital transformation.” 

Identifying the initial workload

The Microsoft team also worked with their counterparts at Siemens Gamesa to identify a single workload on which the manufacturer could both develop and test its new strategies and approaches as well as demonstrate what business and technology success looks like to the rest of the organization. The workload the two teams chose was aimed at a challenging variable in servicing the company’s massive wind turbines: the weather. Adverse weather can increase wear and tear on turbines and make them more difficult, and dangerous, to get to. Siemens Gamesa was already using a weather forecasting tool, but the manufacturer wanted to make that resource available more broadly throughout the company and to make the forecasting data more accurate and useful. 

The on-premises datacenter couldn’t handle the scalability required for greater access, increased data, or more extensive calculations—but Microsoft Azure could. Beyond a mere migration, Microsoft helped Siemens Gamesa developers use their newly acquired skills and methodologies to incorporate more data sources—including from third parties—to scale out the application and create a more powerful and intuitive front end. 

“Once we enabled IT and had our resources in place, we delivered our first three MVP apps in just three months,” says Henriksen. “We went live with global coverage of forecasting services for the entire company several months later. It was amazing and a great example of adopting new processes, new technologies, new hosting, and new team organizations and ways of working to deliver important, value-added apps in quite a reasonable period of time. We showed the rest of the company what we could do.” 

Ready for consolidation—and more

Now, Siemens Gamesa is ready to make a move on its platform consolidation plans with continued engagement with Industry Solutions. The company has already embarked on a dramatic, extensive initiative into digital manufacturing. More is on the way. 

“We have 30,000 turbines under service,” says Heitsch. “Why not connect all those assets, monitor, and control them in new ways, and gather data for new analytics services and diagnostics capabilities? It’s how we plan to increase customer satisfaction and grow our business. Remember, insights without actions are useless.”

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