Upgrade to CAE

Engineers and designers are under increasing pressure to enhance product quality and improve flexibility in production whilst at the same time reducing costs and time-to-market. In an attempt to meet these challenging requirements companies are investing in intelligent, innovative design tools that aim to speed up design time, whilst simultaneously enhancing the efficiency of electrical engineering processes.

A modern CAE software package like EPLAN puts integration and automation at the heart of everything it does; providing a variety of end-users with all the core functions required of an electrical design package, and easily-integrated additional tools that can be adapted for industry-specific processes; from fluid and pneumatic engineering to enclosure design.

Leaving older systems behind, CAE continues to evolve, reducing the amount of manual data entry and error-checking to be done by engineers at each stage of a project.

Companies are sometimes a little reluctant to change their systems, believing their current methodology works and that the implementation of a new system will hamper them initially. However this is rarely the case, and the biggest turnarounds come when companies see the weaknesses in their existing system and processes and make the decision to upgrade to a CAE infrastructure, as was the case with Bürkert Fluid Control Systems.

"We needed a new electrical design software suite that would allow us to become more efficient and EPLAN fitted the bill. In addition, our corporate standard is EPLAN – in fact, EPLAN is widely regarded as the industry standard today,” says Tom Carnell, engineering systems applications manager at Bürkert Fluid Control Systems.

Since adopting EPLAN Electric P8 and the EPLAN Data Portal, the company has been able to reduce project design time significantly and eliminate common editing errors, leading to faster turnaround times. Many tedious tasks, like device wiring and numbering, have also been automated, saving time and improving accuracy.

"We have achieved dramatic improvements in engineering efficiency,” explains Carnell. "We have been able to cut our design time significantly, and design changes and additions are now easily managed.”

He continues; "We use EPLAN for our control panel projects and it has simplified the design of complex electrical circuits, the integration of PLCs and HMIs and the production of reports such as BOMs. We able to integrate other parts of the control panel project such as manuals, datasheets, and Solidworks designs into EPLAN, which are then sent to the customer as a PDF upon completion of the project.”

"Thanks to EPLAN we can effortlessly convert project documentation in minutes, the quality is outstanding. The EPLAN interface is also easier to use and the Data Portal offers a vast number of components, making it easier to access and integrate than with our previous software solution,” explains Carnell.

Data Consistency

The EPLAN Data Portal, provides online device data of over 340,000 components that are controlled and managed by 51 manufacturers such as Festo, ABB, B&R and Phoenix contact. As a result, the data portal has delivered another productivity improvement opportunity due to the wealth of information that is immediately available. Order numbers, technical macros for creating schematics, location drawings, function templates and preview screens can be transferred simply and effectively by dragging and dropping from the EPLAN Data Portal into the project. This effectively does away with the time consuming creation of master data. The outcome is faster delivery due to more intelligent planning, more reliable mounting as well as better wiring. Moreover, storing and reusing data opens the way to standardising and modularising product content, accelerating design and manufacturing and enabling large economies of scale in purchasing components.