This article was written by Arne van Stiphout, illu’s Vice President of Product. Arne is an energy engineer and has extensive experience performing O&M on microgrids in Myanmar.
I’ll be honest, I don’t like checklists. Some people swear by them, and I’ll admit that they can be useful, but somehow they never quite worked for me. Regardless of how I feel though, it’s time we face it: when it comes to micro-grid O&M, checklists just don’t cut it. That’s why at illu, we’re changing things up with workflows.
While working on community microgrids in Myanmar, I realized that our preventive maintenance checklists were only begrudgingly being filled out by our site technicians. Our engineering manager often had to call to go over the items one by one. This got us thinking, why are checklists so difficult to use and what can we do to improve upon them?
After many tests and interviews, we found 3 main challenges with checklists:
- Checklists ask a lot of technicians, since expectations for how work is done and what success looks like are hard to communicate through this format. This lack of guidance makes work particularly difficult for less experienced team members.
- Checklists aren’t designed to ensure standard operating procedures, especially health and safety ones like PPE usage, are being followed throughout.
- When an inspection actually exposes a problem, a checklist is not a great tool to indicate what needs to happen next.
That’s why we developed workflows. Workflows turn any process into a series of cards that technicians can swipe through on their mobile device, noting key observations as they go. This format can flexibly host any series of steps that need to be completed, from preventative maintenance (“Weekly maintenance PV array”) to troubleshooting (“Find connection issue between the inverter and the generator”), to evaluation (“Check lightning protection system robustness”).
Workflows are made up of cards that each represent an individual step. Cards can be anything from “Inspect the panels for cracks and dark spots” to “Take a picture of the panels after you have cleaned them”. The illu team has spent months thinking through and testing every detail of the card design. All cards show photos and text guidance to give technicians all the information they need at their fingertips. On each card, technicians can always leave notes and photos, which can be anything from voltage readings to damage found. A technician can also “flag” a card to escalate any concern or issue to their manager. For any active steps such as safety procedures or equipment inspections, technicians are prompted to actively confirm “done” or “no issue found” for a more engaging way to ensure SOPs are followed. Throughout, technicians can swipe forward and backward through the cards to easily navigate the workflow as a whole.
Workflows open up a whole new opportunity to guide technicians on nonlinear processes, where its modular nature really shines. For example, if a technician reports a cracked solar panel in the “Weekly maintenance PV array” workflow, that tap can immediately launch the exact corrective maintenance workflow to address the issue, for example “Replace damaged solar PV panel” or any other Standard Operating Procedure your organization uses.
To anyone who has had to manage the messy and challenging work that is micro-grid O&M, illu offers a solution that makes that work less error-prone, more standardized, and more verifiable. Contact us to find out more!
This article was written by Arne van Stiphout, illu’s Vice President of Product. Arne is an energy engineer and has performed O&M on Mee Panyar
