Digitalization please!

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If you don’t dig­i­tal­ize your trans­form­ers, you can lose a lot of mon­ey. Peter Novak, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the Sloven­ian trans­former man­u­fac­tur­er Kolek­tor ETRA, is con­vinced of this: “Pow­er gen­er­a­tion has become much more com­plex today due to the increas­ing num­ber of decen­tral­ized gen­er­a­tors and new con­sumers. In order to mas­ter this, it is more impor­tant than ever for ener­gy sup­pli­ers to gath­er data from their trans­form­ers.” The gas con­tent in the oil, the wind­ing tem­per­a­ture, and data from the con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of bush­ings – grid oper­a­tors can use all of this infor­ma­tion to bet­ter uti­lize and mon­i­tor their trans­form­ers. The demand for dig­i­tal solu­tions is there­fore also grow­ing strong­ly at Kolek­tor ETRA.

Dr Simon Ostrožnik, who inte­grates sen­sors and elec­tron­ics into the trans­form­ers as the Head of Tech­ni­cal Office, has also noticed this: “In recent years, dig­i­tal­iza­tion has become an impor­tant aspect of the trans­former mar­ket.” How­ev­er, there are many paths to the dig­i­tal trans­former and count­less sen­sors from var­i­ous man­u­fac­tur­ers. Around 240 trans­form­ers leave Kolek­tor ETRA’s fac­to­ry in Lubl­jana every year – if every cus­tomer had their own indi­vid­ual dig­i­tal­iza­tion sys­tem, it would be poi­son for effi­cient and fast pro­duc­tion. Deliv­ery times for trans­form­ers are already long, so more com­plex­i­ty in pro­duc­tion not only leads to high­er costs, but also means that cus­tomers have to wait even longer for their deliv­ery. 

Although Kolek­tor ETRA was already using var­i­ous dig­i­tal solu­tions and had gained a lot of expe­ri­ence, Novak want­ed to rely on stan­dard­ized dig­i­tal­iza­tion solu­tions for his trans­form­ers, espe­cial­ly since he had found that many cus­tomers also want­ed sim­ple solu­tions. Kolek­tor ETRA ini­tial­ly worked on its own mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem. “How­ev­er, we real­ized rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly that you need a lot of knowl­edge and a large team to devel­op good mon­i­tor­ing, real­ly good soft­ware and appro­pri­ate hard­ware that fits the trans­former. I would say that it is impos­si­ble for a sin­gle man­u­fac­tur­er to devel­op some­thing like this on their own,” explains Novak. So he turned to MR, with whom the com­pa­ny has been work­ing for many years.

Digitalization without development effort

At MR, Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Man­ag­er Susanne Schle­hu­ber and four col­leagues deal with pre­cise­ly these kinds of issues: “We sup­port man­u­fac­tur­ers with our exper­tise in imple­ment­ing their dig­i­tal­iza­tion projects and help with engi­neer­ing, design and process imple­men­ta­tion.” With the ETOS® automa­tion solu­tion, MR offers an open, man­u­fac­tur­er-inde­pen­dent tech­nol­o­gy for the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of pow­er trans­form­ers. “OEMs can then offer their cus­tomers their own dig­i­tal­iza­tion solu­tion with­out any addi­tion­al devel­op­ment effort,” says Schle­hu­ber.

The first step in the col­lab­o­ra­tion was a series of work­shops in which the two part­ners worked out answers to the most impor­tant ques­tions: What func­tion­al­i­ties do Kolek­tor ETRA’s cus­tomers need? What does this mean for the trans­former design? And what process­es should apply so that the inte­gra­tion of dig­i­tal com­po­nents in the company’s work­flow works smooth­ly?

From the out­set, it was impor­tant to Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Novak that as many key depart­ments in the com­pa­ny as pos­si­ble were involved: “All rel­e­vant depart­ments in the com­pa­ny must have a good under­stand­ing of what we offer.” A total of 90 par­tic­i­pants from Sales, Engi­neer­ing, Prod­uct Man­age­ment and Pur­chas­ing there­fore took part in work­shops and train­ing ses­sions. “It was incred­i­bly help­ful that MR pre­sent­ed the prod­ucts to us on site. This gave every­one the oppor­tu­ni­ty to see the com­po­nents up close and try them out,” says Ostrožnik.

Train­ing the ser­vice tech­ni­cians was also a key com­po­nent. After all, who takes care of things when prob­lems occur dur­ing oper­a­tion? For Novak, this was a cru­cial ques­tion: “If every­thing is in order, every­one is hap­py. But the dif­fer­ence between a good man­u­fac­tur­er and a bad one lies in how you deal with things that don’t run opti­mal­ly.” The Kolek­tor ETRA ser­vice team received com­pre­hen­sive train­ing in this regard at MR’s train­ing cen­ter in Regens­burg.

Three smart packages

The result of this inten­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion are three dig­i­tal­iza­tion pack­ages that Kolek­tor ETRA now offers. Ostrožnik explains: “This way, our cus­tomers get a solu­tion that is tai­lored to their needs – from sim­ple to sophis­ti­cat­ed.” The Basic pack­age includes a SCADA sys­tem and an online oil analy­sis. The Expert pack­age is sup­ple­ment­ed by auto­mat­ic volt­age reg­u­la­tion and solu­tions for mon­i­tor­ing the trans­former tem­per­a­ture. And the Pre­mi­um pack­age, includes advanced online DGA oil analy­sis, bush­ing mon­i­tor­ing and more.

“The main advan­tage for our cus­tomers is that they get a good sys­tem with min­i­mal devel­op­ment effort,” says Ostrožnik. Novak is also sat­is­fied with the result of the coop­er­a­tion and believes that Kolek­tor ETRA is well posi­tioned for the future: “I believe it can only go in one direc­tion: things will become more and more dig­i­tal­ized. And we have devel­oped a solu­tion for this togeth­er with MR!”