When electrical designers are using a 2D CAD system to produce electrical designs, they may very well be using a separate solution such as spreadsheet to produce a bill of materials, point-to-point wiring lists and terminal listings from the schematic. It is also probable they will be copying the PLC I/O list from the drawings either directly into the PLC program or even via a spreadsheet. Perhaps they may be under pressure to finish the design but are facing increasing problems completing the schematics.
Having to renumber the devices and wires every time to reflect the same changes in the bill of materials and the wiring list etc, as well as going back to all the other documents already produced, is not a very efficient way to produce all the documentation required by a workshop wireman, as well as being efficient in meeting the customer's requirements.
Although there are many electrical design solutions available, the following overview of an electrical design solution may answer some questions about whether a system could reduce your workload, what it can do for you and whether it would fit into your company's work flow, standards and existing solutions.
Whilst a 2D CAD system produces a picture, an electrical design solution understands connectivity. As it is database-driven, it knows what each device is connected to, and which item and wire numbers have been used, so it can automatically produce the wiring list, the bill of materials and terminal and cable lists that are needed from the schematic. It will even number the wires, terminals and devices. Not only does this give a huge reduction in design time but, because the system is reading information already in the design, there is no chance of errors with duplicated item numbers, missed part numbers and so on.
There is still the ability to copy parts of designs from previous projects in the same way, but then every time the design is changed, one does not need to worry about making sure the same changes are accurately reflected in the reports, because the electrical design software ensures all this. It also has the ability to read in a PLC I/O list directly and draw the PLC schematics automatically from the list. It can also write a new PLC I/O list from the schematic when changes have been made to the PLC design. This means it is no longer necessary to write the list twice.
To produce different types of bill of materials for a customer as well as the purchasing department, is no problem; these files can be included in the drawing set for the customer and produced as an ASCII file or spreadsheet to be read into a company's purchasing system, again reducing the need for double data entry. Each output can also include different information, for example, a customer might need to know the device numbers and manufacturer, but the purchasing department needs to know the price or supplier. All other reports can also be output as files, so device, wire and cable tags can be easily printed without a wireman having to re-read the designs.
And finally, if customers want electronic copies of the drawings for themselves, again, this is no problem as a variety of output methods means they can use a viewer, or the drawings can be converted into DXF, DWG or even PDF format.
All this means that if electrical control schematic designs have to be produced and reports generated from them, a specialised electrical design system really can be the answer and, furthermore, it can satisfy the needs of other departments of a company, as well as the customers' needs.
And the icing on the cake? A recent return on investment calculation undertaken by Rittal has shown that it is possible to achieve payback in as little as six or seven months from start of use.
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| www: | www.rittal.co.za |
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