Feature Enclosure customisation O
ne of the largest challenges faced by today’s design engi- neers is that customer require- ments are becoming more demanding in terms of costs, timelines and customisation requirements. The design engineer, however, is often forced to use standard ‘off the shelf’ products to construct their designs. For components such as ATEX steel enclosures, having the ability to dictate the size and entry requirements with- out the drawbacks of long lead-times and excessive costs, can have some far reaching benefits.
Application examples where this would be of benefit would include: • A maintenance shutdown in a
custom size ATEX enclosure on demand to your exact specification at a suitable lead-time.
Imagine no longer having to compro- mise your design by being forced to use standard ‘off the shelf enclosure sizes’, and operationally the pain of machin- ing those entries into the stainless steel enclosures using expensive traditional machining methods. Instead, just send your completed custom enclosure design to your supplier and have it manufactured on demand.
UK manufacturing
indEx Enclosures is pioneering this new approach to ATEX enclosure supply. The company has set up a
Custom size ATEX enclosures on demand
Custom size ATEX enclosures supplied without the drawbacks of long lead-times and excessive costs – is it possible? indEx Enclosures claims it is
couple of weeks with the need to change 30 year old non-compliant enclosures with those of the same footprint to avoid major disruption.
• A great design but a need for the stan- dard enclosure to be 30mm deeper.
• Where a complex entry design has been finalised and there is no longer the need to expedite time consuming in-house entry preparation.
• Where there is limited space and the smallest enclosure possible needs to be produced.
While this sounds too good to be true, we need to first understand why custom size enclosures are so expensive and time consuming to procure.
Efficient production Historically, ATEX steel enclosure manufacturers have pre- ferred high volume stan- dard enclosures to fill the shelves of their distributors. This has enabled the manu- facturers to make efficiencies by reducing the number of long machine setups and expensive design resources required. This is further compounded for those enclo- sure suppliers that subcontract their metal work, as this inflexibility is dictated to them.
Large batch production can be efficient, but has some major drawbacks for the end customer with long lead-times and the inflexi- bility of producing custom size enclosures. The traditional remedy for having long lead-times is to stock huge amounts of standard enclosures through a distribution model, driving up the enclosure costs and forcing stan- dard size enclosures.
Due to major technological advances in sheet metal design and fabrication over the years, it is now time to challenge this model and its underlying assumptions as there may be a way to efficiently produce both small and large batch custom size ATEX enclosures, due to advances in parametric design software and short setup time machinery. The new model would simply fabricate your
Enclosure & Panel Building Solutions WINTER/SPRING 2013
manufactur- ing base in the UK
which brings together the latest metal fabrication technology and design soft- ware, enabling it to offer custom ATEX enclosures on demand, without the usual cost and lead-time drawbacks. The company has, in fact, taken this to such an extreme that it no longer distinguishes between standard or custom sized enclosures.
It seems, therefore, that mass cus- tomisation is the way forward for enclosure supply.
indEX Enclosures
http://atex-enclosure.com
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