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1) Identify Customer Needs
Identifying and evaluating the needs, budget, and feedback of your customers is a good place to return to when evaluating the efficiency of your design processes. All professional designs start with an initial assessment of the customer’s desired outcomes, but not all processes build 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. With difficulties identified and resolved in real time and full alignment maintained with your customer’s project goals, you save time and money by reducing the need to go back and make changes at the end of the process. The further along the process that changes are identified, for example if the design has gone to production, changes are much more expensive.
2) Specifications Before Design
Specifications and designs can often evolve organically at the same time, with specifications being adjusted to accommodate design limitations. This process, in which design engineers work without tightly defined specifications, can produce designs that are essentially ‘workarounds’, rather than optimised systems.
The reason for engineers taking this approach is the lack of availability of precise real-time performance data, forcing designers to improvise and experiment – with the inevitable inefficiencies and human errors that come with ad hoc design. The solution is to establish workable specifications in advance, then design the application to meet them in the most efficient way.
3) Create Pre-Production Projections
Prior to production it is important to have a proper projection, realised in accordance with professional standards, that enables engineers and the customer to accurately visualise the characteristics of the final product. The best way to do this is through 3D rendering, which bestows a better understanding than 2D drawings and lets you present a 3D representation to address key points with your customer and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Here the design can still be easily changed 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 as every engineer is working from a single source of truth which increases accuracy. It also slices design time as 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 design software, please get in touch today by calling 01709 704100.
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