Failure is not an option
Vestas’ mission, Failure is not an option, expresses the organisation’s commitment to constantly seeking improvements and to constantly following up on and rectifying errors in a structured manner.
The mission also mirrors Vestas’ uncompromising stance on safety, which is given top priority no matter what the context, because the customers demand it and the employees are entitled to it. Vestas has thus succeeded in reducing the incidence of industrial injuries from 25.3 per one million working hours in 2006 to 3.8 in the first quarter of 2011.
The ambition to attain a 6 Sigma quality level, throughout the value chain no later than in 2015, underlines Vestas’ commitment to constant improvement. At the end of 2010, Vestas and the vast majority of its suppliers had reached 5 Sigma, against 4 Sigma in 2008, which is one of the prerequisites for the long-term improvement of profitability. Vestas regularly establishes relations with new suppliers with a commitment to reach 6 Sigma in a joint effort with Vestas.
Vestas currently monitors a little more than 19,000 turbines, or more than 33,000 MW, round the clock, and this opens up for effective maintenance planning, higher uptime and performance of the turbines. This benefits customer earnings and Vestas’ expenditure, as Vestas’ service technicians are now able to service more than twice as many turbines as they were at the beginning of 2008. Knowledge about the yield and general maintenance condition of each turbine is the cornerstone of Vestas’ future growth.
“Lost Production Factor”, which is the share of the potential wind not harvested by the turbines, has been substantially reduced in recent years on the plants, for which Vestas provides a guaranteed performance. Today, Vestas guarantees the performance of more than 25,000 MW. Measured over the past 12 months, the average Lost Production Factor has dropped to less than 2.8 per cent from nearly 4 per cent.
