EPLAN takes an enormous amount of work off our hands in electrical design today. Cross-references are created automatically, terminal diagrams, cable lists and bills of materials are generated from the project, check runs find contradictions before they show up in the workshop. Recurring plant sections enter the project as macros, fully wired and with article data.
One thing does not change. The system works with the structure it is given. A project can be formally correct in every respect and still become unnecessarily complicated later.
Automation makes quality scalable. Mistakes too.
With recurring plant sections this becomes visible quickly. A window macro for a motor feeder, a page macro for an incoming supply, a project template with forms and structure identifiers. Built well, each of them saves time every time it is used. If it contains a wrong article, an unclear designation or a fixed text that should really be variable, exactly that mistake ends up in every project that uses the macro. A good template saves an enormous amount of time. A bad one multiplies its weaknesses just as reliably.
So good electrical design does not start with the question of what EPLAN can do. It starts with how the plant has to be structured so that design, commissioning and maintenance can still work with it sensibly in ten years.
“That was already in the template”
We occasionally hear this sentence when onboarding new designers, and then we ask further. Templates, macros and recurring structures are part of electrical design. But they must not turn into blind copying.
Why was something built this way? Is the solution sensible for this application? Has it grown historically, and would one solve it differently today? Whoever can ask these questions is designing. Whoever does not ask them is drawing. During onboarding, our aim is therefore not that someone produces as many pages as possible as quickly as possible, but that they can judge why a solution is good.
Continue the customer standard at plant 101 or break it?
The same question arises with every customer who has their own standard. When 100 plants have been built to a particular structure, we naturally see things we would solve differently today. But a technically more elegant solution is not automatically the better one for the customer. If maintenance, documentation and spare parts have been geared to one system for years, a single “more modern” plant quickly becomes a foreign body.
Good external electrical design therefore includes first understanding why a standard has grown the way it has. After that, it can be decided together where it is continued and where a change actually brings something. Adopting blindly is just as wrong as wanting to redo everything.
What this means for working together
When we start in an existing EPLAN environment, we first work our way into your standard, from the designation structure and article master data to macros and page layout. What we find, we document, often in writing for the first time. Where no standard exists, we propose one and record it before the first macro is built.
The same applies in ELCAD and WSCAD. It is simply most noticeable in EPLAN, because that is where most is automated. What designations in such a standard can look like is explained in Reference designations in EPLAN. We take on building and maintaining macros and article data as article data and macros, ongoing design as EPLAN design services. And anyone who wants to pass the standard on to their own designers will find that in our EPLAN workshops.