What 16 Months of Work Orders Reveal About Solar O&M

Over the past few months our teams looked at 16 months of categorised work orders (from January 2025 through April 2026) across the Italian portfolios we operate on. Not to produce a client report (even though we do that as well), but to answer a harder question:

how fast do we actually respond, and where does the time really go?

Three things came out of it.

Across the O&M operations we manage, the median intervention time is 137 minutes (two hours and seventeen minutes).

We’re publishing the median because it gives a clearer picture of how our O&M operations perform in practice. It is based on recorded interventions between January 2025 and April 2026, with each work order’s operational data logged and timed. That gives us a measurable baseline we can track, break down and improve over time.

The real achievement for us as solar O&M providers isn’t just the number, but also the established measurement system that makes the the number possible and consistent over time.

What happened when we stopped averaging?

A grid event, a string-level alert and a scheduled corrective task don’t behave the same. They’re detected, escalated and dispatched differently. Blend them into a single response time and what you get is a number that’s technically true but operationally useless: you won’t be able to tell which parts of the chain are slow.

So we measured median dispatch delay by category instead. Looking at where time accumulates before a technician reaches site (detection, triage, work-order creation, assignment, travel) made the picture clearer, and the categories that need attention stop hiding behind the ones that don’t.

The analysis was only possible because the operational process was already in place.

Every field intervention generates valuable information: photos, notes, checklists, time logs, spare parts used, task status, site updates. But that information only becomes useful at scale when it is captured consistently and truthfully. If work-order data is fragmented across emails, spreadsheets and disconnected systems, it is impossible to build an honest 16-month operational dataset.

At Alectris, field work follows a structured digital process that connects technicians, O&M managers and the control room from assignment through completion. Every intervention lands in the same record. That’s what gives us traceability at the individual-work-order level and, as a by-product, a dataset worth analysing.

It runs on ACTIS ERP, the asset-management platform we’ve used to operate our own portfolios for over a decade. When we say data-driven, we mean the data is a by-product of the operation, not a report assembled afterwards.

But measuring performance is only one side of the equation. Improving it also depends on the physical infrastructure behind the operation. Our two warehouses (one in the North, one in the South Italy) currently support field teams across 130+ sites nationwide. Measured response tells you where the delay is; stock in the right place is often how you remove it.

The same months weren’t quiet on the build side.

In Sicily, we completed construction of a 10 MW tracker PV plant, delivered as a full EPC project with engineering handled entirely in-house. The site made us earn it: weather, island logistics, engineering complexity, and the coordination required to keep technical design and field execution aligned from day one.

More broadly, our teams supported 24 MW of recent EPC and revamping activity across Italy: a 10 MW EPC-scope project, a 10 MW revamping project, and a 4 MW EPC build brought to completion. Different scopes but same requirements: structured coordination and documented execution.

The direction from here is to apply the same discipline more widely.

Digitalisation already plays a large part in how we work. The field process behind the data above is one example. We are continuing to build on that across the organisation, making processes easier to document, follow and review.

That work is supported by our certified management systems: ISO 9001:2015 for quality, ISO 14001:2015 for environmental responsibility, and ISO 45001:2018 for occupational health and safety. For us, certification is a foundation, not the finish line. The goal is to keep improving how consistently and transparently those systems work in practice.

And that brings us back to the 137 minutes. It is not simply a number to report. It is evidence of an operation that records what happened, learns from it and gives us something measurable to improve.

Looking for O&M or EPC services for your solar assets in Italy/Greece?. Book a meeting with our team today.