High-Volume Work Software Solutions Improve Operational Efficiency

Westbury Control Systems designs, fabricates and commissions integrated control system automation for OEMs and end user customers across a myriad of industries, including automotive, petrochemicals, gas, oil, plastics, metals, offshore, marines, manufacturing, beverages, food, power, energy, and aerospace.

Westbury Control Systems meets clients’ requirements by engineering flexible and adaptable systems to handle the most challenging industrial applications. The implementation of EPLAN's CAE solutions has enabled Westbury to achieve enhanced and sustainable success with its high-volume work solution documentation packages.

Reason for Switching to EPLAN’s CAE Solutions

In 2008, Westbury found that its existing CAD software was not able to satisfy its on-going design requirements due to lack of integrated accurate outputs. This prompted the company to look into EPLAN as an integrated CAE solution.

Westbury confirmed that EPLAN could fulfill the immediate requirements of Westbury’s customers, and would be able to satisfy the company’s own on-going requirements through the available upgrades. Westbury initially implemented just Electric P8, but today it has full Integration with EPLAN Panel Pro and Data Portal.

Advantages of EPLAN’s CAE Solutions

EPLAN has automated the labor and time intensive tasks of Westbury engineers, including wire numbering and device tagging, in conjunction with the creation of the actual device tags, terminal tags and wire numbers. The internal functionality of EPLAN's intelligent software has enabled Westbury engineers to continuously reduce time and costs by converting Excel spreadsheets and data into useful formats, automatically producing zero-error terminal diagrams and BOMs, and archiving and reusing standard circuitry from project to project.

The mass production of control panels and solutions by Westbury needs an electrical output to satisfy a production and quality program. According to Paul Knott, Operations Director at Westbury Control Systems, the engineering phase of meeting an order needs as low as 2-3 weeks, or as high as 20 weeks for the most elaborate projects. Working with customer designs and regulatory standards of electrical equipment facilitates the company to offer a product with a low-level warranty risk and ascertain a high level of customer satisfaction.

Westbury’s most radical change in design realized within EPLAN involves designing all wiring on the basis of ‘Point to Point’ listing, followed by consolidating through sub-grouping, thus enabling the completion of sub-build prior to finally connecting within the enclosure. The manufacturing output documentation covers every wire number, every connection, and every termination point within terminal rail layouts and identifies connection points on multi-level hardware devices.

Conclusion

In the past five years, Westbury Control Systems has drastically reduced the time required to deliver quality, efficient and reliable solutions to both its clients and to the market. After witnessing the positive effects of the initial EPLAN projects, the company has extended the use of the EPLAN software to all projects.

Westbury plans to completely engage the EPLAN software in the business by coupling it within other product lifecycle management and enterprise resource planning systems utilized by the company’s other departments as Westbury wants to improve further on this success.

This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by EPLAN.

For more information on this source, please visit EPLAN.