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1. Identify Customer Needs
Identifying and evaluating the needs, budget, and feedback of your customers is a good place to start when evaluating the efficiency of your design processes. All professional designs start with an initial assessment of the customer’s desired outcomes. However, not all processes consider customer preferences into every stage of the process.
By tailoring the end-to-end design process around the customer, with feedback and evaluation at each stage, you are ensuring that the design is fit for purpose.
By identifying and resolving difficulties in real-time while ensuring full alignment with your customer’s project goals, you save both time and money. This approach minimises the need for costly adjustments later in the process. The later changes are identified — such as after the design has entered production — the more expensive they become.
2. Specifications Before Design
Specifications and designs frequently evolve simultaneously, with adjustments made to specifications to address design limitations. This approach, where design engineers operate without clearly defined specifications, often results in designs that serve as 'workarounds' instead of optimized systems.
The reason engineers take this approach is the struggle to locate real-time performance data. This inavailability forces designers to improvise and experiment, which results in inevitable inefficiencies and human errors. The solution is to establish workable specifications in advance. Then the application can be designed in the most efficient way.
3) Create Pre-Production Projections
Pre-production projects should be realised in accordance with professional standards. This is beneficial to both the engineers and the customer since it allows the accurate visualisation of the final product. The best way to do this is through 3D models, which produce a better understanding than 2D drawings.
3D virtual prototyping lets you present a 3D representation to address key points with your customer and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Fortunately, the design can still be changed quickly and efficiently, without high costs. 3D digital twins can also help to determine the wiring routes and whether parts will successfully fit, something which cannot be defined by 2D schematic drawings.
4) Use A Centralised Parts Library
Using a quality-checked centralised library of approved schematic circuits significantly improves your design process. This ensures that every engineer is working from a single source of truth, furthermore increasing accuracy. It also reduces design times because these parts of circuits can be reused in multiple designs. Engineers should also consider making this data available to those beyond the engineering team, as this data can underpin the whole ecosystem of industrial automation.
EPLAN - UK Market Leaders In Electrical Design Software
Improvements in your electrical design process can have wide downstream benefits across your electrical engineering and production processes, helping you save money and meet your growth targets. To find out more about the EPLAN range of electrical engineering design software, please get in touch today by calling 01709 704100.
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