The renewable energy industry largely views management decision-making, operational performance, and safety as three distinct, if not unrelated, dimensions of business. The time is now for the sector to improve in these critical areas. Even as wind and solar have progressed in the last decade, the projected volumes in the coming decade are staggering. This exponential scale-up will only happen successfully if a more systemic view is adopted across the value chain. Enter the 2023 h’alt® product launch from ARMSA.

ARMSA’s machine learning-based mentor, h’alt®, was years in the making. The cloud-based SaaS product provides renewable energy clients with the resources they need to improve business performance through informed decision-making and a more holistic view of safety. Prior to market launch, ARMSA brought Engagement Lab on board to secure qualitative insights from a wide range of industry decision-makers to validate product features and inform the commercial positioning of the product.

• Depth Interviews: Engagement Lab recruited 20 industry decision-makers from companies such as Ørsted, TotalEnergies, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, EnBW, Aker Solutions, and GE Renewable Energy for the purpose of understanding not only the empirical answers to our research questions but also the underlying experiences, emotions, and context behind those responses.

• Qualitative data coding: Transcripts from these 20 interviews were coded and anonymized to identify emergent patterns and narrative trends, resulting in a quantitative analysis of the conversations. This analysis formed the basis for our recommendations on product features, the product’s launch narrative, and future brand positioning.

• Commercial positioning advisory: Engagement Lab’s behavioral findings affirmed and pointed the company to an exclusive position in the market: that h’alt® uniquely promotes front-end loaded decision-making, using safety as a driver for performance, which leads to a unified way of executing projects.

At the product launch ceremony held in June 2023, Engagement Lab presented pivotal findings that both affirmed and informed the positioning of h’alt® in the marketplace, including:

• Deep insights on the “profit vs. safety” dilemma facing many renewable energy operators.

• The mechanism for incentive structures to be calibrated so that safety and training remain a high priority during all levels of decision-making.

• The urgency for a more systemic view of operational performance and safety, including the need for a paradigm shift toward front-end loaded decision-making.