Brackwater moved turbine inspections off paper in 9 days

A clipboard on every climb

Brackwater’s technicians inspect every turbine twice a year, climbing 80 meters with a paper checklist. The sheets went back to the site office on Fridays, where a coordinator typed the faults into a spreadsheet. Coordinators spent a day and a half each week retyping, and photos of damage lived on technicians’ own phones. A cracked blade found on a Monday could wait until the following Tuesday for a work order.

The company had tried a commercial inspection app, but it needed a public cloud connection, and several sites have none. Brackwater’s security policy also keeps operational data inside its own network.

Onsite, and on a phone

Brackwater runs Chamfer Onsite in its own data center, so the app builder, the apps and the Logbook all stay inside the network. Callum Reid’s team described the app in one prompt: a phone checklist for each turbine model, three photos per fault, a severity of Minor, Major or Stop, and a work order raised for anything above Minor.

Two technicians tested the first build on a Tuesday. They asked for bigger buttons, offline saving and a dark theme for night work. Offline saving mattered most: a technician can finish a full inspection with no signal, and the app syncs when the van reaches the site office. Brackwater’s IT team approved the first release that Friday, after checking the roles and the Onsite network rules. Seven days later, all 60 technicians had it on their phones.

Photos go to an S3-compatible store on site. Postgres holds the inspection records, a Databricks model reads them to predict gearbox wear, and any Stop fault posts to the control room’s Slack channel within a minute of being saved.

The right people see the right sites

Technicians see only the turbines at their assigned sites. Supervisors approve every Stop fault before a turbine returns to service, and the Logbook keeps the name, time and photos behind each decision. Each work order carries the inspection record, so the repair crew sees the photos before they climb. When a contractor finishes a job, their access ends with their account in Brackwater’s identity provider.

“The first version was on two phones before lunch,” Callum says. “The technicians shaped the rest, which is why they actually use it.”

What changed

• 60 technicians on one inspection app, 9 days after the first prompt

• Fault to work order in 2 hours, down from 2 days

• No paper checklists left at any of the 20 sites

Brackwater’s three builders have since added a spare-parts request app and a permit-to-work tracker, both running on the same Onsite install.