{"id":7126,"date":"2026-07-15T14:17:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T19:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/?p=7126"},"modified":"2026-07-15T14:17:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T19:17:28","slug":"problem-solved-simplifying-schematic-and-system-design-with-mark-russell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/problem-solved-simplifying-schematic-and-system-design-with-mark-russell\/","title":{"rendered":"Problem? Solved! \u2013 Simplifying schematic and system design with Mark Russell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019 pain points. The new \u201cProblem? Solved!\u201d<\/a> RS Expert Advice series features RS experts<\/a> addressing common customer challenges they can help you overcome.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this edition, we spoke toMark Russell, the Technical Application Solutions Manager at RS<\/a>, about how he and his team in the RS Technical Solutions Center can help industrial customers \u2014 ranging from design engineering firms and machine builders to OEMs \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n

Hi Mark. Thanks for <\/strong>joining us again<\/strong><\/a> to dive deeper into the customer challenges that you and your team solve in the RS Technical Solutions Center. Let\u2019s talk schematic and system design support. What kinds of pain points are customers facing, and how can you and your team help?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Anyone who\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

This requires a very large packet of schematic and system designs that encompass everything from drawings of the machine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collecting all the information that these design files require can take an incredibly long time and tie up a lot of labor resources \u2014 especially since it\u2019s also essential that all the information is accurate, which often means many rounds of revisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, once you\u2019ve taken the first stab at your schematic and system designs and you\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continuous iteration is an inescapable part of the industrial design cycle. But it\u2019s incredibly time consuming, and it often doesn\u2019t even end with installation. For instance, say you\u2019ve gotten all your schematic and system designs finalized and you get the machine built and integrated into the production system, but you couldn\u2019t wire it exactly how you drew it because something got in the way. Now you\u2019ve got to make \u201cas-built\u201d redlines and update the schematics. Or maybe you came back from your customer installation, the machine\u2019s up and running, and the customer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019re 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.       <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d like, even bring them into one cohesive system so you don\u2019t have to work with two software platforms, two teams, or two different design firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s not uncommon for MRO teams to have 15 or 20 different design files from their system builder \u2014 or more, depending on the scale of production \u2014 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 which is sometimes preferable when you\u2019re out in the field \u2014 that significantly improves accessibility along with the efficiency and accuracy of installation, maintenance, and repair processes and reduces downtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Streamline your design cycle with RS schematic and system design support<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong> or contact the RS Engineering Services and Support<\/a> team to learn more about our schematic and system design services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":7129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"BlogPosting","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1101],"tags":[515,683,649,693,607],"class_list":{"0":"post-7126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-problem-solved","8":"tag-expert-advice","9":"tag-expert-insights","10":"tag-rs","11":"tag-rs-americas","12":"tag-rs-group"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":false,"span_bottom":false},"number_of_votes":1,"sum_votes":5},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/mktg-allied-electronics-automation\/image\/upload\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1784141443\/Expert%20Advice\/Problem__Solved__2000x800_avpdsu.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7126"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7131,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7126\/revisions\/7131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.rs-online.com\/expert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}