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Filling a design need01 July 2009Form, fill and seal machine specialist, Elopak has now consolidated its electrical design activity following a review of legacy E-CAD systems, and now bases it entirely on the EPLAN platform to achieve greater stability, reliability and productivity through increased design automation Established in 1957, Elopak is a leading provider of liquid food packaging products and their associated machines. At the heart of its packaging portfolio is the Pure-Pak carton, the world’s first paperboard carton, for which it designs and builds high-speed form, fill and seal machines. Up until recently, Elopak’s machine options had always been designed into each individual customer unit, a task that involved a good deal of duplicated design effort. The decision has now been taken to offer different configurations of the same machine as standard, instead of building standard models with options that required additional design, thus creating a more seamless and consistent design process.
As this new strategy was put into effect, the company reviewed its existing electrical computer aided design (E-CAD) software, which proved woefully inadequate for the new venture. It was prone to generating incomplete reports, dropping drawing files and data as well as failing to reproduce some graphic elements in PDF files. Hundreds of pages of data per project had to be entered and verified manually to generate reports and much time was being lost verifying the accuracy and completeness of the work produced. Software vendor support also appeared to be non-existent.
Analysis by one of Elopak’s electrical engineers, Michael Ballinger also showed that the legacy E-CAD system was costing the company roughly $25,000 - $30,000 annually per engineer; based on $20 per hour for lost productivity arising from these deficiencies. Elopak at this time employed six electrical engineers for hardware design so the annual lost productivity costs exceeded $150,000. Elopak’s objective with the new software was to achieve greater stability, reliability and productivity through increased design automation. Moreover, in order to keep up with global standards, the company needed to adopt IEC/DIN standards. Thus began a process of elimination, as Elopak sought a suitable application.
Eventually, and with just two ‘finalists’ in the running, the final choice hinged on an objective drawing competition to show the capabilities of each selected E-CAD system. Both packages used macros, but each processed them differently. The task involved the use of PLC/IO, a heater circuit, a PID control loop, terminal designs, panel layouts, power generation and associated reports. The task was to identify how much time and how many mouse-clicks it would take to draw the circuit in each E-CAD system, implement the I/O, put the panel layout on paper and generate reports; the reliability of the reports was also tested. As it turned out. One of the two competitors withdrew from the competition, leaving EPLAN in pole position, as Mr Ballinger recalls.
“I had some experience of the [withdrawn] E-CAD system from my previous employment and had gained a very favourable impression of it. At this point I had no real knowledge of EPLAN; however, in hindsight, should the other vendor have stayed in the competition I am confident that we would have still selected EPLAN as it far exceeded our expectations.
“One area where EPLAN most impressed us was through the series of little shortcuts integrated into the software. It automatically draws the wire connections between devices and allows the user to name any symbol the same name as another symbol, and cross referencing is immediately established. We were also excited by the ability to be in the same page as another user over the network and see the live updates that they make.
“We don’t believe that tools drive fundamental change, but it’s fundamental to have the right tools, so people are equipped to make change happen. From an organisational perspective this applies to all engineering disciplines. EPLAN presented the ideal platform concept for us; products built on the same database platform, sharing data and synchronized during all project phases.” Elopak subsequently purchased Electric P8 and three other add on modules; EPLAN Fluid for hydraulics and pneumatics, EPLAN Cabinet for enclosure configuration and EPLAN PPE for process plant engineering, along with EPLAN’s API extension, which was used to create the data bridge between Electric P8 and the Windchill production management environment. An updated parts database was created and resides in the PLM system, which will feed data back to EPLAN.
EPLAN in action
Elopak has now undertaken its biggest project yet using EPLAN Software. It involved redesigning the controls platform of each of its current filling machine models, moving from a Mitsubishi PLC platform to the Siemens Simotion-D Motion/PLC system. The first model to undertake this electrical redesign was the E-PS120UC. It was broken down and rebuilt into functional units. All electrical enclosures, cabling and switchgear were redesigned for Siemens products, and all motion control was reconfigured, based on the Simotion and Sinamics platforms.
“With former manual processes now EPLAN automated, the job time was shortened by about 20-25%, compared with that of our legacy E-CAD system. We were able to go into the build stage of that machine faster than we were accustomed to,” says Mike Jessup, Elopak’s controls engineering manager. Michael Ballinger looks forward to a time when his team will be able to concentrate more on the technology and less on the ‘paper chase’. “As long as the engineering time is up front and everything is laid out well at the beginning, I think we’ll cut development time in half. Longer-term, we would like to design of all our machines in EPLAN, so when our customer unit sells a machine, they can choose the configuration and the system will give us the prints. It would free up much more valuable time which we can utilize to focus on developing new technology.”
Currently, most electrical design in the UK is performed using simple, two-dimensional CAD systems that produce flat drawings where all accompanying lists and documents have to be researched and assembled separately. EPLAN performs these functions automatically and instantaneously, compiling schematics, lists and documents from data which only needs to be entered once. Using single data entry and EPLAN’s capability to enforce design rules, the risk of errors – as well as the need to error-check entire projects – is largely eliminated. The package is database driven. Schematics are built up using intelligent symbols and component representations containing all relevant technical information. As a component is inserted into a schematic, all lists and documentation are updated and cross-linked.
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