E3.WireWorks has been having a very positive impact on our clients, but just because the design team wants the tools, does not mean they can convince the ones that hold the purse strings to invest in it. To justify the E3.WireWorks investment it is important to identify 1-3 areas where there will be a measurable return. With the work that I have been doing with our clients over the last few years with E3, I have identified 5 top areas where a good return is possible.
1) Product development time shortened
A typical product development cycle for electrical engineering has a great deal of time spent on schematics and an equal or greater amount of time spent detailing panel layouts, cable or harness plans, and generating reports like bill of materials. E3.Series and E3.WireWorks have the capability of greatly reducing this product development cycle by streamlining original schematic creation, partially automating panel and cable layouts and completely automating reports. The graphic below shows how the typical design process may change.
Even more important than the time savings of the original design is the time savings of design changes. With all electrical design fully associative, design changes will automatically propogate which avoids the extra time spent updating information in all appropriate places.
2) Manufacturing is easier
With drawing packages being done in E3.WireWorks, manufacturing will be more streamlined than ever. The extra detail makes it a breeze to interpret and there are a variety of ways to consume the documentation electronically such as the intelligent PDF’s with hyperlinks between references. You can even take it as far as building step by step instructions for panel building with the combination of wire reports and the E3 Viewer. This video shows some of the ways to build from E3.WireWorks:
3) Common costly errors are avoided
Errors creeping into designs can be more than a nuisance – it can lead to many wasted hours of corrections, unnecessary communication and ordering of materials. If the errors make it through the manufacturing stages and into the field, there are even more costs related to making fixes out in the field. E3.WireWorks plays a significant role in reducing the amount of errors that make it into the drawing package. By keeping devices and wires organized and unique, it makes it easy to copy, update and reuse drawings without forgetting to do rename and make repetitive changes to multiple drawings and reports. There are even online design rule checks that catch miswiring signals together, catching loops or in some cases performing online circuit calculations.
4) Get the information you need, when you need it
There is a lot of benefit to a company to get the information you need when you need it. If high lead time items need to be ordered from an early bill of materials or milestones of work need to be shared with clients, it can be very advantageous to have a tool in place that avoids unnecessary work to hit your intermediate goals. Even more significant is being able to leverage the work that has been done to speed up the remaining design steps. WireWorks has allowed our customers to achieve this by keeping the entire electrical design associative on an electrical engineering database. You can literally start anywhere in your design process and fill in the blanks elsewhere later on.
Here is a quick list of steps that can easily be the first on your list:
- Bill of Materials
- Detailed schematic
- Single line schematic
- Panel layout
- Cable interconnects
- Hydraulic or process schematics
- Tag lists
- Location and hierarchy planning
5) Sales boosted by increased competitiveness and quality
Up until this point I have been focusing on reducing cash flow out of the business. This is great, but many companies have been seeing a large benefit to the cash flow coming into the business as well. With higher quality deliverables and incredibly quick turnaround times, customer relationships and margins have improved. Both of these have lead to more dollars and cents in your pocket by increasing loyalty and winning more contracts.
Learn more on E3.WireWorks here: http://www.javelin-tech.com/main/products/electrical_design.htm
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