Ciel & Terre ensures digital continuity across its international sites

In summary

By using Aletiq, Ciel & Terre was able to:

✓ Streamline technical data management (CAD, drawings, instructions, quality)

✓ Create synergies by harmonizing ways of working across sites

✓ Ensure digital continuity of data between France, India, and regional subsidiaries

✓ Improve product quality and maintain compliance with requirements

Ciel & Terre is the world leader in the floating PV market through the development of its innovative technologies. Floating solar involves installing solar plants on bodies of water (quarries, dam reservoirs, retention basins) generating renewable energy without using up any land.

Present for 14 years across 30 countries and 5 continents, Ciel & Terre has deployed around 330 floating PV plants worldwide and operates from Europe, Japan, Taiwan, India, and the United States.

Operational challenges

The operational teams identified several issues holding back their performance and ability to innovate:

Inefficiencies in technical data management

→ Working on a local network with no metadata: finding a document, file, or reference was highly complex

→ No way to know which assembly a part was used in, or to anticipate the impact of a change

→ Entirely manual technical processes (tracking sheets, Excel files, emails…) creating a high risk of error

Compliance risks & lack of traceability

→ Insufficient traceability on CAD changes, data updates, and product configurations

→ Need to secure data over the long term and reliably track the status of approved parts

Need for digital continuity with international subsidiaries

→ Complex collaboration between R&D centers in France and India

→ Difficulty sharing up-to-date data with regional subsidiaries

A fast-moving industry demanding flexibility and efficiency

→ Regulatory and standards framework for floating photovoltaics still taking shape

→ Increased competition requiring constant adaptation to each market's specificities

Faced with these challenges, the Ciel & Terre team decided to adopt a PLM to structure parts and revision management. Most team members had never used this type of tool before: they needed a solution that was easy to get started with, quick to master, and flexible enough to adapt to existing processes.

Aletiq implementation

The deployment at Ciel & Terre was fast and gradual, product line by product line, migrating all data and ways of working into Aletiq. The Aletiq team was highly responsive, training was completed quickly, and the tool was adopted without friction. System flexibility was a key criterion for a company whose processes were still evolving.

In just 2 months of guided onboarding, all product lines had been migrated and new ways of working put in place:

→ Definition of the target model with operational teams: data structure, workflows

→ Migration of Ciel & Terre's historical data

→ Software configuration

→ On-site personalized user training

Team adoption & results

Since deploying Aletiq, teams in France and India work according to the same processes, supported by verification workflows that reduce errors and clarify responsibilities. Multi-site collaboration is no longer a bottleneck.

Concrete results observed:

→ Thanks to a single source of truth, teams can easily find existing data and documents (parts, projects, files)

→ BOM management is more rigorous and better tracked than before

→ Project management is automated and collaboration is much more fluid

→ Engineering change processes have accelerated

→ Product quality and compliance with requirements have improved

→ No more duplicate files: no more uncertainty about which version to use

→ Approved components are immutable, guaranteeing the integrity of reference data

→ No work lost due to corrupted or broken file links