How To Improve Your Engineering Design Process

First Design In 3D

When starting a project, one option is to first plan your mounting layouts in 3D to ensure that all required comfortably fit comfortably within the allocated enclosure size. If not, components can easily be dragged and dropped into another location, or you can easily and quickly change the enclosure size within the platform. In addition, some ECAD solutions, such as EPLAN, not only give visual cues for collision control, but also identify important airflow gaps which enable the product to last longer and optimum wire routes to make the most of materials. By minimising the risk of having to go back and rectify mistakes that could have been foreseen in the design stage, you’ll save a lot of time and money.

Optimise Your Engineering Decisions

Ensuring that your engineers have access to accurate data in visual, collaborative and comparative formats is essential to ensuring consistently high-quality standards. This data should be accurate, high quality and easy to access to allow your engineers to focus on the important tasks – and spend less time validating and translating data.

Improving your design engineering process starts by focusing on data-driven decision-making throughout the entire process. By gathering and analysing data from past projects, you can make more informed decisions about future projects’ direction. For example, if you find that certain parts are failing quality control more often than others, you can use this information to modify future designs or, before implementing practical changes to increase their reliability on the production line.

Choose The Right ECAD Software For Your Business

Having the correct software will not only streamline your design process but will also reduce errors and result in higher-quality designs. Provided that you select the best solution for your budget and business needs, ECAD software will help streamline the product development process by enabling your electrical engineers to quickly and accurately create detailed electrical schematics without having to manually draw them out by hand. When investing in an ECAD solution or making a business case to your senior managers and directors, make sure that the software is versatile and scalable enough to meet all the requirements of both your current and forecasted future projects. The extensive R&D team at EPLAN enable us as a business to always stay ahead of the curve and bring you the very best technologies, not just now, but also in the future. Additionally, consider the application’s ease of use and accessibility, so that engineers can quickly learn how to use it and adapt it as needed over time.

Always Have A Quality Control Checklist 

Quality control should be an integral part of every design engineering project from start to finish. Although this may seem a given, many companies miss this step – maybe because it is so obvious that they assume that quality controls are automatically integrated into their procedures and systems. 

Regardless of the reasons, it’s important to always have a written and mutually agreed quality control checklist in place before commencing with any project. A quality control checklist helps ensure that all aspects of the product meet customer expectations and regulatory standards by listing out specific criteria for each component or assembly in detail. It also creates clear collaboration guidelines for electrical and mechanical engineering teams during the product development phase, so they can easily identify any potential issues before they become major problems down the line.  Ensure your design does not move to the next stage before it passes quality control and has no errors.

Implement A Continuous Quality Improvement Plan

Finally, implementing a ‘continuous quality improvement plan’ is essential for ensuring ongoing improvements in your design engineering processes over time. By making small incremental changes (as guided by your performance and efficiency data) here and there across the production process, you’ll gradually reap big benefits in productivity and reduced costs as these cumulative improvements manifest in more efficient processes and better products. Set your strategic improvement goals in writing and incorporate them into your team KPIs and the KPIs of individual engineers, as they relate to his or her work. 

More important than the ‘letter of the law’, however, is trying to encourage a continuous improvement attitude among your engineers. By actively looking for ways in which they can improve, and building positive self-reflection into every project review analysis, your team will remain dynamic, and will always be looking for better ways to work.

Find Out About EPLAN

EPLAN features a range of tools that give engineering managers access to a reliable source of truth on which to base intelligent business decisions. To find out more about our electrical design solutions and how they can benefit your team, please call 01709 704100 today.