Feature Electrical Design Software
The latest design tools and technologies are providing a whole host of benefits for the companies that are adopting them. By doing this one company has revolutionised its engineering process, as EPLAN’s Ken Christie explains
ith the introduction of pow- erful central databases, labo- rious and time consuming functions of engineering design can be performed automati- cally, instantaneously and accurately. In fact modern CAE software is leaving CAD behind and reduces the amount of manual data entry and error check- ing to be done by engineers at each stage of a project. Ultimately this allows businesses to reduce costs and shorten their time to market.
an order can take as little as three days, or as much as 60 weeks for the most elaborate projects. However, a typical order involves a customer wanting a single machine to produce a new motor or for augmenting or streamlining current production. Lohrman continued, “It might be as simple as adding a machine similar to one they have now, or showing us a product they want to produce and asking, ‘How do we manufacture it?’”
A glimpse at the future of engineering W
Above: Ken
Christie, director of EPLAN UK
Machines that build machines Companies that are recognising that their existing CAD software is no longer sufficient for their current or future requirements are turning to the EPLAN Platform. However, the engineers at US-based Advanced Machine & Tool Corporation (AMT), a company spe- cialising in the building of machines for the automotive industry (amongst others), didn’t sense that it was lacking anything until a major auto industry customer made a point of stipulating it wanted EPLAN electrical drawings for the machines it orders to expedite the production of documentation and improve their accuracy.
AMT initially implemented EPLAN on this customer’s projects but soon began the gradual process of rolling it out across all electrical and fluid power assignments.
Commenting on the decision to switch, AMT’s electrical engineer Mark Lohrman, said, “I thought we were comfortable with our old CAD system, but I sure wouldn’t go back to it now.”
The engineering phase of fulfilling
Integrated automation EPLAN’s CAE Platform has helped to simplify and speed-up traditionally time consuming product development steps across the company. Using the company’s previous CAD software, the assignment could well have taken up to two weeks, however, the EPLAN system has saved about 23- 28 work hours.
Device tagging and wire number- ing, previously manual tasks, have been automated along with the gener- ation of the actual device tags, wire numbers and terminal tags. AMT engineers use the internal functional- ity of EPLAN to set-up the printers by transmitting an Excel spreadsheet with all the data - equating to about four to five hours’ work.
The integration of fluid schematics into the overall project has also saved around six work hours by eliminating errors and missed components. “Automatic numbering is a big thing for us,” continued Lohrman. “I can go to the parts list and pick out a part. If there is a macro associated with it, I am set.” The benefits of archiving and re- using standard content are growing with the amount of content items
stored as EPLAN macros - now over 300 processes and over 500 compo- nents. Lohrman added, “Drawings are archived and can be easily found. I can bring up a complete set of draw- ings in just a few minutes - I don’t have to go back into paper files. While the vast majority of our machines are custom, there are a few we repeat with minor adjustments. With EPLAN, we can pull up the drawings, make minor adjustments quickly and easily, and spit out a set of plans for it.”
AMT engineers also make good use of the EPLAN Data Portal to download component data sets. “Data Portal is easy to use,” said Lohrman. “It’s a major time saver not having to go through all the pages of documenta- tion to find out measurements. If I
Above and below left: Advanced Machine & Tool Corporation (AMT) implemented EPLAN on all
electrical and fluid power assignments
want a new part, I always go to Data Portal first.”
Initially AMT took a conservative approach to implementing EPLAN. The first projects were benchmarked to verify productivity gains. “Now we are at a point where regardless of what is being released, we do it in EPLAN,” concluded Lohrman.
Switching to one of the most sophis- ticated computer aided engineering programs has made it possible to gen- erate accurate and well structured doc- umentation faster than ever before, liberate engineers from the most tedious aspects of their job and stream- line the organisation’s operations - ensuring it remains receptive to clients’ needs and future business.
EPLAN
www.eplan.co.uk T: 01709 704 100
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Enter 208 JULY/AUGUST 2013 Electrical Engineering
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