Higher Quality in Less Time

By Kenny Dunhoft, R.A. Jones

If you’re a manufacturer facing industry challenges such as global competition, mass customization, and outsourcing, which of these performance characteristics do you select to maintain a competitive advantage: quality or speed?
The correct answer is both of them. To achieve this objective, a company must evaluate and restructure its internal processes and make sure it has the proper technology tools to enable those changes.

Identify Challenges, Set Goals

R.A. Jones & Co., a manufacturer of high-speed packaging equipment for the consumer products, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical industries, historically relied on AutoCAD in its engineering department. The manual process in place for adding cross-references to electrical schematic documents was labor-intensive and error-prone.

“Due to the manual processes required, it normally took us three to four weeks to complete a set of drawings using AutoCAD,” says Scott Richardson, one of R.A. Jones’ electrical controls engineers. “We commonly found it necessary to cross-reference and perform manual checks on drawing packages that were 40 to 50 pages long.

“There were lots of bottlenecks in the process. Each person reviewing the design marked it up and sent it back and forth to the other involved personnel. This manual process depended on humans to check for changes in the information.” It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone to understand why and how this process was prone to human error.

Put it all together

AutoCAD Electrical allows R.A. Jones to streamline the process of designing and building control panels for large packaging machines. The schematic drawings are closely linked with the panel drawings ensuring no device has been overlooked. Photograh courtesy of R.A. Jones

The company also had an inefficient method for creating bills of materials (BOMs) in conjunction with the design process. The designers had to do the electrical BOMs first, and then the drawings. Because some suppliers had long lead times, parts were put on order early to ensure they’d arrive at the shop when the electricians were ready to build the panels.

“This meant we frequently had to backtrack and take the excess parts off the BOM once the electrical schematic design was completed,” adds Tim Meyer, another electrical controls engineer at R.A. Jones.

To compete effectively, the company had to improve its ability to get products to market faster. The manager of engineering tasked company engineers with cutting design cycle times in half. That was an aggressive goal that required the electrical engineering department to consider adopting new technology that would reduce errors and eliminate costly rework.

Select Tools, Manage Implementation

R.A. Jones’ electrical engineering department needed an overall process change. That was very clear. It also was clear that the technology selected would be the key to enabling larger, department-wide process changes. The department conducted extensive research on the different solutions that were available, and based its decision on what it felt would provide the best benefits, namely the ability to reuse the existing data and the ease of implementing the improved processes. These were the key drivers in deciding which application to choose.

“Since we’d been using basic AutoCAD for more than 20 years, we had a large library of parts we wanted to continue using,” explains Meyer. “We were looking for a minimal learning curve. We wanted to use our legacy data in its native format with no conversions. And, we wanted a tool that would add significant value, and not just repackage our existing issues. So, choosing an application that would easily work with AutoCAD made the most sense. In addition, it was important to us that we were able to use several different control suppliers’ products with the software.”

By selecting AutoCAD Electrical, an application built specifically to create and modify electrical controls designs, R.A. Jones could continue to use its existing library of parts because of the true AutoCAD interface; it is AutoCAD for controls design. It was an open package from the standpoint that it worked with many of the suppliers’ products. And since R.A. Jones had been with Autodesk for such a long time, it was very comfortable with Autodesk as a vendor.

The implementation was carried out over approximately one year, which included the following key milestones:

• Train the Trainers—The first step was to get two team members trained on AutoCAD Electrical through a local reseller. Since they were already familiar with AutoCAD, it took them about two months to become proficient.
• Expand Training—These two employees then conducted a wave of training sessions for R.A Jones’ entire electrical engineering department, approximately 20 engineers. The trainers made sure that the instruction was very specific to their firm’s line of business and to the tasks its engineers face every day. Each electrical engineer received two full days of training. It took approximately six months for the initial implementation. However, there were some other issues that delayed the training, so it might have been implemented more quickly. Even in the early stages of implementation, the benefits were apparent.
• Establish Templates—The next step was to set up templates for each machine design, so the company would have a universal template for everyone to work from, and be able to hit the ground running. Previously each machine line had custom formats. The new AutoCAD Electrical package complemented R.A. Jones’ efforts to modularize design templates across the board.
• Leverage Existing Data—When the electrical engineers chose AutoCAD Electrical, they knew the program not only would introduce automation to increase efficiencies, but also would let them continue to leverage the DWG data they’d been generating for decades. “For example, we had a library of AutoCAD blocks that we’ve been able to use with AutoCAD Electrical,” explains Richardson. “We simply added some additional AutoCAD attributes to those blocks so we’re able to take full advantage of the enhanced functionality available within AutoCAD Electrical.” This functionality strongly contributed to R.A. Jones’ decision to adopt AutoCAD Electrical instead of competing softwares.