SkySpecs’ Solution to the Technician Shortage

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
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's
brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. 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?