GE Renewable Energy approached us to evaluate their suite of wind power products, with the goal of connecting wind farms and their far-flung monitoring systems into a single, modern software solution that would create efficiencies across the company’s value chain. 

From the outset, the client appreciated the challenges of designing for an ecosystem of siloed users with different priorities and areas of expertise: from energy asset managers and platform engineers responsible for performance and power output, to remote operators and on-site technicians charged with anticipating and addressing outages.

Success meant deeply understanding each of these user groups’ needs, and building a system that ensured the same data was available to all, in exactly the format needed for each specific workflow.

Over the course of a two-year initiative, Futuredraft partnered closely with the client executive team to introduce processes and tools for collaboration and alignment across the company’s product teams, to foster a single, consolidated product vision and united product leadership.

We then worked with those leaders to define workflows and design patterns that would be effective in all critical scenarios, and narrowed the desired feature sets into a realistic initial product release.

We provided front-end development expertise to augment the client's engineering team, and guided them toward more efficient software development processes.

In the final stages of the project, we worked with the the client product team to take ownership of a robust design library supporting the creation of new features, and provided guidance for conducting further user testing and validation before release.

GE Renewable Energy has now launched Lifespan. With the newly implemented system, five global Remote Operation Centers and 50,000 field technicians operating 40,000+ wind turbines across 40 countries, are now using the same data to seamlessly provide visibility into insights and drive workflows.

The end result is that everyone is able to level up their understanding of critical functional and business needs in order to be more strategic and proactive in their work.

And now the energy company has a unified organization with proven design and development strategies to carry them through the maturation of the product.