Effective incident response to safeguard employee safety and well-being is essential for Nordex Group, a Hamburg, Germany-based company that designs, builds and operates wind turbines that produce renewable energy in more than 40 countries across the globe.
The installation and maintenance of wind turbines involves numerous safety hazards, with much of the work performed at dangerous heights and often in harsh weather conditions. Therefore, safety incidents must be quickly responded to, monitored and resolved.
To improve workflows and increase transparency into safety data, Nordex turned to DXC Technology for a software platform to centrally manage health, safety and environmental (HSE) information. Even better, the system is helping to change the company’s safety culture.
“This was a key initiative to have a comprehensive view of health and safety and an aligned understanding of what health and safety means to the company.”
Marko Ladehoff Vice President and Head of the Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE) division, Nordex Group
Increased simplicity, improved integration
Many organisations face challenges in quickly responding to work-related incidents, often relying on manual tools and fragmented processes to identify incidents, notify employees and put plans into action.
Nordex realised it needed to modernise its existing HSE platform. Specifically, the company wanted to integrate the platform into a single application to manage all HSE-related workflows. In addition to reducing the complexity of the app landscape, Nordex wanted to streamline processes and achieve lower total cost of ownership.
The groundwork for the new platform had been laid when Nordex began using ServiceNow for IT service management (ITSM) for technical requests related to its wind parks and wind energy turbines.
The DXC Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) Management Suite, built on the Now Platform, provided an optimal solution for Nordex to manage all HSE-related workflows. The application is provisioned through the ServiceNow store and serves as the central management system for reporting and responding to HSE issues.
Reducing the risk profile
Nordex embraces a safety-first approach, and gathering and analysing HSE data is a crucial aspect of keeping employees safe. To minimise risk, incident and emergency response teams must manage, track and respond to issues in an efficient and consistent manner. DXC’s HSE platform is helping the company increase data transparency and reduce its risk profile.
“We wanted transparency because without it we were not able to launch the right preventive actions and do the analytics,” says Marko Ladehoff, vice president and head of the Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE) division, Nordex Group. “What we are doing with DXC is to organise, control and monitor all the health and safety data we have in house and use this data for proper and consistent analytics and investigations that come up with preventive actions.”
Many of the issues occurring at Nordex are non-IT incidents related to worker safety and well-being. These cases need to be reviewed and investigated to act quickly to minimise risk. Leveraging the reporting capabilities of the Now Platform, Nordex has a 360-degree view of corporate-related incidents, putting the company in the best position to make fact-based decisions to reduce risk.
More than 6,000 Nordex employees are using the DXC HSE Management Suite globally, dealing with over 40 HSE cases per day on average. With DXC, Nordex has achieved its goal of reducing hazards and preventing incidents before they happen.
Value delivered
Faster incident response
DXC has also incorporated Corporate Incident Response (CIR) elements into the solution, providing Nordex with workflow management that enables the organisation to quickly and proactively identify, address and manage all non-IT corporate incidents. Incidents are prioritised based on criticality, and the CIR solution enables the sending of corporate-wide notifications such as alerts, push notifications, email and SMS texts to predefined groups.
“The person who is entering an incident can immediately select people who can join the incident and give additional input or add ways of solving it.”
Marko Ladehoff Vice President and Head of Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE), Nordex Group
The solution’s report-first design approach simplified the incident management process and allows for ongoing feedback loops between Nordex business and IT. Users open an HSE incident ticket and use a pull-down menu to fill out an information form, with menus and tools supporting every step of the process.
“The person who is entering an incident can immediately select people who can join the incident and give additional input or add ways of solving it,” Ladehoff says.
Other benefits include increased operational resilience, streamlined governance and improved tracking of time and date information, which provides better traceability. Ladehoff says the DXC solution has helped Nordex reinforce its safety-first policy and unify its approach to safety.
“This was a key initiative to have a comprehensive view of health and safety and an aligned understanding of what health and safety means to the company,” he says.