Author
If you’re a panel builder, you don’t need to be told that life’s tough. The pace of modern technology means that your customers need to replace their panels far more often that in the past, which sounds like it should be good news, but in reality it means that they expect to pay less for each panel. That makes building the panels profitably a difficult challenge, especially if, as is all too likely, your own costs have gone up rather than down. There’s only one way to respond and that’s by increasing your efficiency so you can cut your costs. Sounds challenging? Even impossible? Actually, it’s probably easier than you think.
But let’s be straight about this, you will need to change the way you work, in every part of your manufacturing operations. You’ll need to turn your back on traditional manual methods of working and instead look for ways that modern technology can reduce your workload, increase your productivity and boost those all-important profits. Fortunately, you’re not on your own in this quest. EPLAN has set hundreds of panel builders on the route to success and enhanced profitability. And you could join them.
This is the first in a short series of blog posts that will tell you about the differences EPLAN could make to the key operations in your business, starting with kitting.
Kitting sounds simple. You get the bill of material (BOM) for the panel you’re working on, go to the stores and take out the parts you need for the job. Anyone who has actually done it knows that it’s never quite like that! If the BOM has been produced manually, rather than generated directly from the design drawings by a system like EPLAN Pro Panel, there’s a good chance it will have mistakes.
That’s bad enough if you get back to your job, only to find you don’t have all the parts you need to complete it, and have to waste time making another trip to the stores to get them. It’s even worse if you have a few parts left over at the end of a job. It’s unlikely that they were in the stores by accident so now the job they were intended for is likely to be held up because of shortages. And, if nobody notices where the parts have gone, they’ll have to be ordered again, which wastes both time and money.
Now look at the alternative. An automatically generated BOM will be complete and free from errors. It will even include all of those little items, like end cheeks for terminals and coding plugs for connectors, that everybody forgets to specify and order. So now there’s only one trip to the stores to pick up the kit of parts for a job, and you can be sure you’ll have everything you need without any unwanted “extras”!
Mind you, there could be times when several trips to the stores would suit you better. If it’s a big panel, do you really want to draw out all of the parts at once? Maybe it would be better to get them in stages, as the job progresses. It’s easy to arrange for automatically generated BOMs to be split to allow this way of working, and the extra effort involved is negligible.
BOM with all of the parts you need
So what's the bottom line? Research carried out by EPLAN has shown that a typical panel builder can cut the time spent on kitting and fetching parts from the stores by as much as 50% if they switch from manual to automatic methods. That’s a big saving and, if you’re a hard-pressed panel builder, you know you want it!
If you’d like to optimise how your electrical control panels are designed and manufactured, and to uncover the cost and time savings which can be made, request your free assessment now.
Comments