Baettr develops a future-proof app to standardise and scale its supply chain

The future of our planet depends on renewable energy sources. For over ten years, Baettr has been supplying the wind energy industry with turbine components, handling everything from design and casting right through to assembly.

Although its precision parts allow no room for error, until recently Baettr’s manufacturing and regulatory documentation were mostly being manually handled. But with production scaling, and a new plant opening in India, they realised the need for a digital solution that could help reduce the likelihood of human errors and standardise the process across multiple global manufacturing sites.

That’s when Baettr called upon the technical know-how of a pre-existing IT partner, extri:co, to help them build a Power App based solution that could sit seamlessly within their existing Microsoft stack.

The Challenge

Serving customers around the world, Baettr produces heavy wind turbine components for nacelles and other bare frame steel components for the wind energy industry onshore applications. 

They operate within a ‘just in time’ industry, which requires them to be lean and agile in response to customer demand, whilst at the same time delivering slow-moving alloy parts, which can weigh between 15 and 40 tonnes. Legal regulations and quality standards means that each component requires rigorous checks and accompanying documentation on its journey along the production line. 

With manufacturing taking place in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, India, and China, Baettr’s manual processes for production and certification were exposed to more localised approaches, and were providing too much opportunity for human errors. This resulted in different standards across production plants and slower production times due to heavily paper-based processes. Pieces of paper could get easily lost, misplaced, or misfiled, causing unnecessary bottlenecks. 

The company soon realised that a solution was needed to help standardise workflows and ensure that users had all the relevant data on hand for quality and documentation purposes.

With an existing Microsoft stack in place across their locations in Europe and Asia, it was logical to seek a templated approach that could be rolled out across multiple sites, providing a standardised digital solution that integrated seamlessly with their existing tools. 

Baettr’s vision was for a durable and long-lasting solution which could provide greater visibility and scalability both now and in the future. They also needed to unify the production process and the data collection points required for certification and verification. A third requirement was for the captured data to be available for analysis, which could potentially provide actionable insights in a process of continuous improvement. The app also needed to be available in multiple languages. 

As an organisation strong on process, Baettr began by analysing their existing foundries. It soon became clear that they needed to make their processes digital. Data collection needed to be more efficient, with fewer operators and heavier components. Using smartphones and apps was an obvious choice, so they reached out to extri:co to collaborate on creating a solution.

The Solution 

Without a definitive specification in place, extri:co were able to take part in the design process at an early stage. This enabled the partnership to have an ongoing dialogue around the scalability of software, and helped them bake-in the ability to optimise and evolve the solution over time. In other words, they could future-proof the app and align it with a culture of continuous improvement. 

With over 15 years experience of implementing SharePoint solutions, and working with the Power Platform since its release in 2018, extri:co were perfectly positioned to know that Power Apps were a good fit for this particular challenge. Firstly, Power Apps mitigated the need to employ a team of full stack developers. Secondly, they would enable Baettr to take over development of the platform for themselves going forward. Thirdly, this approach would mean that Baettr were not locked into a single independent software vendor.

extri:co has a strong track record in working with businesses who are clear on their processes, but require more technical expertise with the heavy lifting to create their ideal software solution. From the first drawings there was an ongoing dialogue, with Baettr sharing their requirements and extri:co making adjustments and putting the technology behind it. Taking a collaborative approach, extri:co were empowered to challenge Baettr to help drive future scalability and cost-effectiveness. 

Built on the Power Platform, the app is powered by Power Automate. It’s also connected with SharePoint to provide photo functionality, and it’s hosted in Microsoft Azure. User identity is required so that registration changes can be easily tracked. By using the available building blocks from the Power Platform, extri:co have not created a custom app, they’ve delivered a customisable solution from out-of-the-box functionality – which makes it easy to scale a particular part of the solution independently. This is also important for a rapidly scaling company who tomorrow may have new products and new customers, and new employees to integrate from different locations around the world.   

Greater transparency and visibility over data has also meant Baettr can use Power BI to gain data-driven insights, which enable them to optimise processes and find opportunities for improvement on the shop floor level. 

For Baettr, the digitalization of data collection will eventually eliminate paper-based registration processes and provide more reliable and transparent tracking at key data points. It’s given them the opportunity to scale production flow across multiple locations and continuously improve, prioritise, and make improvements both now, and in the future. 

It’s also proved that this type of solution can support a very broad range of processes and services, and they’ve since rolled out similar approaches in other departments, such as HR, to further digitise their business with a real focus on tangible improvements that deliver efficiencies and better value.