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News 12. June 2018

GE joins APQP4Wind

Today, GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind business joined APQP4Wind, a qualitative assurance standard group for the wind industry. Together with current members Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, APQP4Wind now includes 3 of the 4 largest wind turbine OEMs. The purpose of APQP4Wind is to lower costs across the wind industry by setting uniform standards used by suppliers, energy companies and wind turbine manufacturers.

Two years after the establishment of APQP4Wind – a cross-industrial project facilitated by Wind Denmark (formerly known as the Danish Wind Industry Association) and supported by the Danish Industry Foundation - GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind business has joined APQP4Wind. The aim of the project is to take the players in the wind industry from a regime of quality control to a regime of quality assurance.

“GE recognizes the value in the establishment of standardized quality processes and tools within the wind industry. Joining APQP4Wind will allow GE to contribute to the development of the program and help to strengthen its adoption and application within the supply chain,” says Kevin Creagan, Senior Quality Programs Leader for GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind business on the reason for joining APQP4Wind, and continues:

“GE has a long history of benchmarking best in class companies across various industries and adopting best practices across our multiple businesses.  This, along with our Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma experience, can add value to the overall program while incorporating the established proven standards already in place.”

The rapid development of standards
APQP4Wind was established as a project two years ago and in January 2017, the project launched its first manual and an interactive workbook with templates supporting the use of the manual. Since then more than 900 employees from participating companies have taken training courses to be able to make use of the quality assurance standards. This expansion will now continue also with suppliers to GE.

“We intend to expand the application of APQP4Wind standards across our supply chain and network of key global suppliers.  GE can be a champion to grow APQP4Wind utilization and membership in order to consistently meet our customer’s requirements and quality expectations,” says Kevin Creagan, and the Programs Leader have big expectations on the development of APQP4Wind:

“APQP4Wind standards will help drive to the lowest LCoE for our customers, which will help the overall wind industry and subsequently GE. As we develop and launch new wind products to compete with other traditional and renewable energy sources, it is critical to assure that processes have the highest quality and efficiency in order to achieve the most competitive power generation throughout its lifecycle.”

APQP4Wind officially welcomed GE at an event held in Denmark on June 12th. At the same event, APAPQ4Wind took the first steps to become an individual organization.