In this edition of the new Problem? Solved! RS Expert Advice series,Mark Russell, the Technical Application Solutions Manager at RS, explains how schematic and system design support helps industrial customers reduce engineering backlogs, overcome skilled labor shortages, ensure regulatory compliance, and minimize costly downtime.
RS serves industrial customers who build and maintain assets and infrastructure throughout the discrete and process manufacturing, facilities and intralogistics, and energy and utilities industries — providing an extensive array of proven product solutions from trusted suppliers as well as a selection of value-added solutions and services designed to solve customers’ pain points. The new “Problem? Solved!” RS Expert Advice series features RS experts addressing common customer challenges they can help you overcome.
For this edition, we spoke toMark Russell, the Technical Application Solutions Manager at RS, about how he and his team in the RS Technical Solutions Center can help industrial customers — ranging from design engineering firms and machine builders to OEMs — with their schematic and system designs to improve engineering backlogs, reduce the impacts of skilled labor shortages, ensure regulatory compliance, facilitate effective collaboration between electrical, mechanical, and control personnel, minimize costly downtime, and more.
Hi Mark. Thanks for joining us again to dive deeper into the customer challenges that you and your team solve in the RS Technical Solutions Center. Let’s talk schematic and system design support. What kinds of pain points are customers facing, and how can you and your team help?
Anyone who’s familiar with the overall industrial design cycle knows that coming up with the original plan for how a machine should work is really just the first part of it. After that, you need to create a comprehensive record of how everything will come together.
This requires a very large packet of schematic and system designs that encompass everything from drawings of the machine’s physical form factor and how it integrates with the system to the layout of the system itself, for instance a conveyor or a robotic work cell or a mobile platform. These designs also record how machines are wired and powered, where sensors come in and out, and often even the logic flow to some extent.
Schematic and system design files provide machine users with a detailed blueprint for safe operation, efficient maintenance, and effective troubleshooting and are key to ensuring regulatory compliance, minimizing costly production downtime, and facilitating precise, productive collaboration between electrical, mechanical, and control personnel.
Collecting all the information that these design files require can take an incredibly long time and tie up a lot of labor resources — especially since it’s also essential that all the information is accurate, which often means many rounds of revisions.
For example, once you’ve taken the first stab at your schematic and system designs and you’ve got all these rough lines on a page, you may realize that you need to swap a sensor out or change the way a sensor is wired or upsize some of your motors or circuit breakers. Or maybe you’ve even built your original set of drawings and have them looking pretty good, but you need to change this, change that, rework this, add some sort of custom component, or connectorize a solution — take out the end-to-end points and put in actual connectors. Things like this come up all the time and take up a lot of time.
Continuous iteration is an inescapable part of the industrial design cycle. But it’s incredibly time consuming, and it often doesn’t even end with installation. For instance, say you’ve gotten all your schematic and system designs finalized and you get the machine built and integrated into the production system, but you couldn’t wire it exactly how you drew it because something got in the way. Now you’ve got to make “as-built” redlines and update the schematics. Or maybe you came back from your customer installation, the machine’s up and running, and the customer’s real happy, but now they want to set a final drawing prints for their maintenance team. That alone can easily take up 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 hours.
And a lot of small and medium machine shops have two or three engineers and a bunch of on-site installers, and in teams like this, the engineers are already going to be working on the next string of developments they have to prioritize, which leaves them doing schematic revisions for built projects or drafting final prints as time allows.
These are the types of instances where partnering with RS can be especially advantageous. My team in the RS Technical Solutions Center can edit schematics and deliver final drawings so you can keep your engineers focused on current projects, keep current projects from getting backed up without expanding your engineering team, and provide your customers with revised drafts and final drawings in far less time.
When working with schematics, we tend to break things up into the mechanical drawing set and the electrical drawing set. Mechanical and electrical drawings are generally managed separately — often in even different CAD software. While your mechanical plan is likely to be in some sort of 3D CAD software, like SolidWorks or AutoCAD 3D, your electrical plan could be 2D or 3D, depending on whether you’re generating electrical schematics and wiring diagrams or cable harnessing, and in CAD software like EPLAN and Pro/ENGINEER (Pro-E), which recently changed its name to PTC Creo.
However, we can also layer these drawings. For example, if you need to combine two disparate systems into a deliverable for your customer but are short on engineering labor or bandwidth, we can layer them for you, correct any inconsistencies between the two, and, if you’d like, even bring them into one cohesive system so you don’t have to work with two software platforms, two teams, or two different design firms.
Industrial facilities are full of machinery, and critical information about every machine and every system that machines enable are captured in schematic and system design drawings. So, it’s not uncommon for MRO teams to have 15 or 20 different design files from their system builder — or more, depending on the scale of production — and for many of them to be on different software platforms or different pieces of paper. But this disparate collection of files can be time-consuming and labor intensive to reconcile, which isn’t ideal given persistent skilled labor shortages and the fact that these drawings play a key role in maintenance and repairs and industrial downtime is outrageously expensive.
My team can save all of your schematic and system design files as a single file type and move them into a single software platform or physical drawing — which is sometimes preferable when you’re out in the field — that significantly improves accessibility along with the efficiency and accuracy of installation, maintenance, and repair processes and reduces downtime.
Streamline your design cycle with RS schematic and system design support
If reducing engineering backlogs, ensuring regulatory compliance, and minimizing costly downtime sounds advantageous, reach out to your local RS representative at 1.866.433.5722 or contact the RS Engineering Services and Support team to learn more about our schematic and system design services.
RS offers a variety of proven engineering capabilities designed to improve the time- and labor-intensive process of finalizing schematic and system design files for industrial facilities, ranging from managing iterations and ensuring accurate “as-built” documentation to combining your disparate mechanical and electrical drawings into a single, readily accessible platform and correcting any inconsistencies between them. Our technical application engineers are happy to talk to you, learn your business, and help you identify the RS product and service solutions sure to help you optimize your operations.
