Computer-aided engineering (CAE) software is the designer's best friend, a tool proven to enhance the user's productivity. It has liberated engineers from the most tedious aspects of their jobs, shortened project turnaround times and improved the quality and accuracy of their work. Today's advanced electrical CAE (E-CAE) programs have automated many tasks, such as wire numbering and device tagging. Engineers are completing assignments that once took days or weeks in a fraction of the time. The latest generation of CAE programs such as EPLAN adds a powerful central database that enables them to provide substantial additional automation. This database can hold a large archive of recurrent content, ready for insertion into a project with a single keystroke. Engineers can convert project documentation into different languages or regional, national and international standards. This makes the database-centric CAE wellsuited for cross-country and cross-border collaborations or for serving a multinational customer base.
The database-centric CAE solution EPLAN can make every phase of a job, from design through production, more efficient or cost-effective with gains that include the following.
Improving Accuracy
The database-driven CAE delivers a systematic reduction of errors, error-checking and data redundancy. Few, if any, errors survive to the manufacturing stage or beyond, where they're significantly more costly to fix.
Leveraging Recurrent Content
Storing and reusing data opens the way to standardizing and modularizing product content. This accelerates design and manufacturing, and enables large economies of scale in purchasing components.
The benefits of standardization are so great that some companies redesign existing models to maximize standard content so design and manufacturing for subsequent orders take less time. Others invest considerable resources creating large content archives as part of their transition to a database-driven CAE. The archive can store frequently used components or complex macros of product assemblies and subassemblies, all pre-validated.
Creating Efficiencies
The database can be integrated into a company's IT architecture, allowing other departments to monitor a project's progress for more accurate customer quotes, more timely and cost-effective stocking of components, and more reliable production and delivery scheduling.
Streamlining Interaction with Stakeholders
Project files can be exported to customers and re-imported with changes to speed up revisions and approvals. They also can be exported to subcontractors to shorten delivery times. Engineers can import component data directly from vendor catalogues.
Learn more at www.eplanusa.com
