Develop and optimize a wind turbine offer to become the leader in a segment

Confronted with a rapid evolution of technical constraints making its offer obsolete in the short to medium term and a very strong pressure on costs, our client wishes:

• Strengthen its position on onshore high-power segments and areas of moderate to strong wind
• Develop a new power chain by anticipating the normative and technical evolutions governing the interconnection of turbines to the grid
• Becoming the reference in energy costing

The goal to be achieved: generate 30% more cost savings thanks to a Design-To-Cost project of the power chain.

An allocation of target costs by function is made to give the necessary economic objectives on the definition of the new product.

IAC consultants work in close coordination with programme management, engineering and procurement to arrive at the right definition of requirements, architectural choices, sourcing and co-design strategies with the main expert suppliers.

The search for optimized concepts is structured around 2 complementary axes:

• Open the panel and consultation to more competitive alternative expert suppliers and obtain offers on major components. This extended benchmark of purchase prices made it possible to select the most competent suppliers to dimension and design the core system (generator, converter, power transformer).
• Conduct idea research workshops directly with suppliers to define and validate the most promising optimization and breakthrough paths. Co-design and negotiation workshops are organized and facilitated by IAC with potential OEM partners.

IAC takes care of the definition of consultation documents, price breakdowns, as well as the monitoring and consolidation of offers in close collaboration with an engineering-purchasing team.

The technical and commercial alignment extended to the issues of warranties, indemnification clauses, technical availability and flexibility made it possible to build power relations on very solid bases and to conduct the final negotiations towards solidly tied contracts ensuring an excellent quality-cost-availability ratio.

• Results above targets, with 35% cost reduction achieved.
• An approach extended throughout the project to other areas with high cost stakes.

Thanks to this success, our customer was able to consolidate its position and lay the foundations for a new design at the scale of the complete turbine, incorporating the benefits of the new optimized power chain.