Portrait of Professional Engineer Wearing Safety Vest and Hardhat, Uses Industrial Digital Tablet to Program, Manipulates Robot Arm, Looks at Camera and Smiles. Factory Workshop with CNC Machinery

Capstone Turbine: XFRACAS to Improve the Power Generator Business

Capstone Turbine, USA

Introduction

Using ReliaSoft XFRACAS to improve customer satisfaction in the power generator business. Evan Franke is the Director of Lifecycle Analysis at Capstone Turbine, based in Van Nuys, California. He said: “My department mostly goes into looking into reliability data, field data and engineering data. We seek to understand that, and quantify cost of ownership, reliability uptime, availability and the key metrics are important to our customers."

chevron_left

Challenge
Solution
Résultat
Client Description

chevron_right

“We had about three or four major categories of products. And each one has at least 20 combinations, at least twenty variances. And we were sending it out globally, into lots of different countries and different applications. So that adds up quickly to hundreds of unique scenarios we needed to understand. We needed a product that could collect all this information and bounce it off all the different characteristics. And have a solid database that said where these were, when they were produced, what operation profiles they have and what environments they are in.”

“From what we saw, XFRACAS had the most integration into our engineering department... It had the most ties into failure modes, to engineering data and was highly configurable. So we could take any aspect that we had learned was important, and put that back into our data analysis practices. Other products we saw had maybe one element of that, and XFRACAS seemed to cover all the elements we needed.”

“XFRACAS helped the most in just helping us understand our systems and what was necessary to get us to the next level of competition and customer satisfaction. Now we can very quickly take the information from the field, and use the different [ReliaSoft products] to understand that data. Whether it’s from a marketing or an engineering perspective, and quickly understand that, and turn it into something that we can then get back to our customers. That’s where it came in the strongest.”

Capstone Turbine

Capstone Turbine manufactures power generators. ReliaSoft's XFRACAS software a highly reliable product, and that’s why we have done a lot of business with HBM Prenscia, now HBK, in the past. The power generators range in size from 30 kilowatts to 200 kilowatts.