Designing in EPLAN - right out of the box

Family-owned Janicki Industries, with headquarters in northwestern Washington state, is a well-regarded manufacturer of high precision parts, tooling and molds used in building aircraft, boats, architecture and wind turbines. Founded as Janicki Machine Design in 1993, the company’s original focus was on introducing machined composites for boats. Since then, it has branched into composite fabrication and CNC machining for the aerospace, transportation and wind energy industries in the US and abroad. Manufacturing big parts requires big machining systems. The nine, huge 5-axis CNC mills at its three plants are designed and built by Janicki Industries specifically for handling complex, large-scale, high-precision projects. The company’s milling capacities are among the largest in the world, with machining envelopes up to 100 feet.

EPLAN provided IEC environment

Before he went to convince senior management on upgrading from their CAD software to EPLAN Electric P8, mechanical engineer Erik Herron wanted to reassure himself on a number of points. Did EPLAN offer sufficient additional value? Would it be an onerous process for the small engineering group to learn a new system? He dedicated himself to a 30-day trial, testing the capability of the software. “And those two things were true. I went through the user’s guide and immediately saw the value in EPLAN. It can be learned fairly easily. It’s not that there isn’t a learning curve, but you can pick up that beginner’s guide and start making drawings.” He also wanted to work in the International Electrotechnical Commission, or IEC, environment and not have to struggle implementing it in new software. His finding: “Just using EPLAN right out of the box, you will be able to use IEC. That was key for me.”

Major productivity gain realized

Janicki had just undertaken a major SAP implementation so Herron had to make a really strong business case for another software buy. It was 2014 and the company was fully utilizing its three electronics technicians and there was a question of hiring a fourth to help with engineering. "I made some grand assumptions that we were going to get the benefit of at least one equivalent electronics tech, or more, out of this switch,” says Herron. “We easily beat that.” After Janicki bought its first license, Herron continued for months to learn from the manual and watching EPLAN webinars before attending a training course. Upon returning from the course, he began a practice project that mirrored an actual one being done in their CAD software program by colleague Tim Bailey. The practice version was going well. Bailey was intrigued, so they completed the project in EPLAN. At first, Bailey, who did not have the EPLAN training yet, was hesitant to make changes because of how easy it was to lose a lot of good work when forced to refresh in a CAD project. With EPLAN’s database architecture, that’s not an problem. “I was telling him, ‘Have at it, Tim’,” says Herron. “You can do whatever you want, even screw it up. You’re not going to do anything catastrophic to it. EPLAN is childproof!”

Revising prototypes much easier in EPLAN

Between major projects like new CNC mills, much of Janicki’s engineering workload is either developing and testing prototypes for the company’s R&D lab, or maintenance-related. With their current CAD software, it was extremely difficult to make significant changes to prototypes. Now, engineering can change them freely, even multiple times. EPLAN also is helping make work in the field more efficient. Working to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standard in the CAD software, the technicians had to be given line numbers and wire labels before installing a new device, even if an engineer had to make a special trip to the office to provide that. Now, technicians can just take the next available device number from their EPLAN PDF and the documentation can be updated later. With the IEC data structure, the technician does not have to wait for line numbers from an engineer to complete his or her work.

Custom lists now possible

Generating reports in the CAD software usually was limited to the Table of Contents and parts list. It was hard, often maddeningly so, to get a PDF of a drawing set. With EPLAN, there are more than a couple dozen standard lists and reports generated per project, improving the quality and speed of installation and maintenance. The engineering group can generate customized lists, which was pretty much unthinkable in their CAD software. For example, a customized report template of Ethernet TC/IP addresses, in numerical order, with MAC numbers, needed to install an Ethernet device, might take an experienced hand an hour or two to create in EPLAN. In addition, the customized report template is re-usable. Creating the comparable report template in the CAD software would have taken much longer.

Building content for larger projects

While the engineering staff are benefitting already from everyday design automation features like the smart connect features, automatic error-checking and smart links on PDFs, automation engineer Andy Neeld expects EPLAN will deliver even bigger benefits when Janicki’s next big mill project comes along. The team is building a library of parts and other macros that will help cut design time for such mills, perhaps by half or more. EPLAN is ready for such challenges. “When you work on large projects, the success is on the data structure,” says Erik Herron. “You can have the best engineers, the best electricians on the planet, and if you don’t have a good data structure with good information flow, you’re going to fail. With the CAD software, it was very hard to re-use information, and it was disjointed. With EPLAN, I clued in really quickly that it already had a well-defined, well-sorted-out data structure that I could scale up.”

Quality is big win

The net benefit from switching to EPLAN is measured not only by the improvement in productivity but also in product quality. A CNC mill is designed to last for 15 years or more. “Our business model isn’t production,” says Neeld. “Our business model is to iterate on ideas… It’s making that thing work and work well. If I can save time in an EPLAN drawing set, that’s okay, but if we can spend more of our time trying to effect the hydraulic system natural operation and less of our time in our CAD software, that’s where the real savings are at. That’s the big win for the next 15 years.” Janicki Industries switched to EPLAN Electric P8 from their CAD software in 2014 to take advantage of the benefits of design automation. The incentive was economic improvement – a projected boost in annual productivity at least equivalent to the cost of adding an electrical designer was part of the pitch to sell senior management on EPLAN. That forecast gain would prove overly conservative; EPLAN delivered much more. For the company’s small engineering group, other benefits are even more important, like being able to devote more of their time to optimizing a design and less on tasks associated with creating and managing data. Find out more about Janicki Industries at <link http: www.janicki.com _blank external-link-new-window external link in new>www.janicki.com.