What we did in a nutshell
Operations departments are responsible for running the company as efficiently as possible. In the renewable energy industry that includes managing the entire project, ranging from planning to installation to incident management.
Throughout our work at Kwest in the past few months, we’ve been talking to more than 50 operations leaders in the renewable energy industry. This includes companies in the solar industry, operators of EV charging stations, and operators of energy storage solutions. In this post, we want to share our key insights from these conversations.
These are the four challenges for operations leaders in the renewable energy industry
Lack of visibility
Many operations leaders are “flying blind” and don’t have a good overview of where operational processes stand. This makes it hard to identify bottlenecks and where companies are losing valuable time. Getting transparency is even more difficult if work happens across departments or together with external partners. Put differently, someone told us:
“The gold lies in getting process analytics for your Operations.“
COO – eMobility company
Lack of flexibility
Operational processes change all the time but with most of the tools that are being used, it is hard to implement change frequently. Especially if a CRM such as Salesforce is used to run operations, operations managers are always dependent on developers to change hard-coded processes. This usually takes a lot of time and they need to use workarounds before changes are implemented.
Lack of automation
It requires operations leaders a lot of manual work to set up operations processes in the early days to reach their business goals. To scale their operations processes and minimize human errors, they want to automate as much as possible. Most of the tools they are using offer automation but orchestrating the different tools together is often quite cumbersome.
Lack of standardization
Besides automating operations processes, operations leaders also want to standardize them across their team. To do so, they need a tool that ensures process consistency and standardization. Since many of them are relying on a subset of different tools such as GSheet, Airtable, E-Mail, Slack, CRMs and custom platforms, it is very hard to ensure standardization across these different tools. We’ve also written about implementing process standardization here.
If you’re interested solving these four challenges, reach out to us.
