Electrical control panels play a crucial role in a wide range of industries, enabling operators to monitor and control complex processes and equipment. It is a critical tool for electrical engineers and control panel designers to optimize manufacturing processes, reduce production costs, and increase productivity. With the E3.series tool suite and Smart Cabinet Building initiative, engineers can streamline their design-to-manufacturing workflow, reduce errors and rework, and ultimately deliver high-quality control panels to their clients.
Panel Builder for E3.series is an E3.panel plug-in designed for control panel manufacturers to improve efficiency. Control panel manufacturers can automate wire processing, drive drilling and milling machinery, and incorporate digital assembly procedures.
In addition to the functions of Panel Builder for E3.series, manufacturers can leverage additional E3.series tools to support control panel design layouts and documentation.
Increase wiring assembly productivity with Panel Builder’s Wiring Task Manager feature. The Wiring Task Manager provides step-by-step digital wiring instructions to aid the shop floor. Each wiring task gives the technician a visual guide of where to connect and route the wire in a 3D and 2D representation of the control panel, along with full details about the wire and the terminations. Once the technician marks the job completed, the Wiring Task Manager automatically updates to the next wire for installation.
Features and Benefits:
Control panel contract manufacturers can leverage Panel Builder’s wire list import tool to quickly populate devices into the project with connectivity information. This feature is a huge time saver enabling the designer to drag and drop the devices directly to the panel to create the layout. From here, the designer can intelligently route the panel wiring automatically while meeting the user-specified design rule requirements.
Features and Benefits:
To prepare for production, designers can utilize additional tools to include necessary manufacturing details. With tools like E3.Toolbox, designers can create a bill of materials and wiring lists. Instant access to the bill of materials can aid in part procurement to prepare for assembly. Both outputs are fully customizable and can be placed on the drawing sheets or outputted to Excel.
Designers can leverage E3.DrawingNotesManager to easily add production notes from a database of standard notes to assist with communicating manufacturing standards and operations. Images can be added inside the notes to help enhance the instructions and information, making them more effective.
To aid in the fabrication of electrical control panels, E3.CutOut provides a way to extract mounting and cut-out information from the design to drive automated drilling and milling machines. Components and panels can contain this cut-out information in the intelligent library, or designers can define dynamic mounting and cut-out areas per project. E3.CutOut exports this detailed information as a project sheet and to a standard DXF format for universal application.
Panel Builder for E3.series includes a customizable hole chart feature for manufacturers using a semi-automatic or manual process. The hole chart automation function automatically creates a drill hole outline sheet detailing the locations and a table of the specifications for each drill hole. This table includes details of the hole diameter, coordinates, and engineering notes or instructions.
By leveraging the automatic wire length calculations based on the wire routing from the 1:1 scale panel design, manufacturers can drive wire processing machines with accurate information to match the manufactured product. Panel Builder 2023 for E3.series creates wiring list export files in native formats to provide instructions for wire processing machines from Schleuniger, Komax, and nVent, cutting and stripping each wire to the required length. Manufacturers can reduce material waste and save on cost and time manufacturing each unit.
E3.ExportToKomax allows customers to export wire information to load into KOMAX TopConvert. This output offers an automated way to quickly load entire cutting lists into wire processing machines. The output merges the wires into bundles based on the output mode. With device-driven bundles, the bundles divide into sub-bundles per device for different destinations. The tool also offers checks for unrouted wires, wires exceeding cut length limits, and availability on Komax machines of wires and connector pin terminals.
