Why You Need Dedicated Electrical Design Software such as EPLAN

While certain challenges, like the laborious task of wire numbering and the time-consuming process of creating cable schedules can be addressed with various engineering design solutions, there are other more complex issues that demand a specialised electrical engineering design solution with advanced automation features. These include manually tagging PLCs, accurately sizing panels, and accommodating last-minute design changes requested by customers.

In this article, we discuss the four main benefits of investing in multi-functional electrical design software.

In today's fast-paced world, efficiency is key for electrical engineers to stay competitive and meet the demands of complex projects. To streamline their design processes and to maximise productivity, electrical engineers are turning to dedicated electrical design software solutions. Among the leading options is EPLAN, a powerful software package tailored specifically for electrical engineering tasks. Join us to explore the reasons why electrical engineers should consider using advanced electrical design software like EPLAN.

1) Increased Productivity

A digital twin allows for thorough testing and analysis of an object under various scenarios, to understand likely performance outcomes. This can identify areas for potential improvements, weaknesses, and inefficiencies in far greater detail, and from a greater number of viewpoints, than a standard 2D view. Using digital twins as a ‘virtual prototype’ can shorten the research and development cycle, and facilitate better design decisions being made before an object goes into physical production.

2) Error Prevention

Electrical design software, such as EPLAN, can help reduce errors by providing a visual representation of the design, which allows engineers to spot mistakes and make corrections at an earlier stage – reducing costs and downtime. With intelligent design automation, engineers can rely on built-in design rules and templates specific to industry standards, ensuring compliance and reducing the risk of errors. The software also provides extensive libraries of standardised electrical symbols, promoting consistency and eliminating errors caused by incorrect or non-standard symbol usage. EPLAN's automatic cross-referencing and update capabilities help engineers maintain accurate connectivity and quickly identify any inconsistencies.

Error detection and prevention is a feature common to all CAD applications. However, using generic CAD software not specific to electrical design makes the work more prone to errors and other issues. Having specific ECAD software enables a range of potentially expensive issues to be detected early in the design process rather than being discovered during the build process, which can be much more costly.

3) Compliance with Industry Standards

Electrical engineering projects must adhere to various industry standards, regulations, and norms. Dedicated electrical design software like EPLAN provides built-in tools that support compliance with these standards. The software typically includes extensive libraries with pre-defined symbols, templates, and design rules specific to different industry standards (e.g., IEC, ANSI, NFPA).

By utilising these standardised elements, engineers can ensure consistent designs that meet regulatory requirements, while also reducing the need for manual validation and error correction.

4) Design Information Management

The best ECAD software will provide user-friendly interfaces and collaboration tools to facilitate better design information management between you, your customers, supply partners, and panel builders.

Electrical schematic software enables multiple engineering disciplines to work together on a project in real time, ensuring that everyone is on the same page, and allowing collaboration on lists of parts, materials etc, that would be extremely time-consuming without the use of the correct software.

ECAD software is structured with the electrical design process in mind, providing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that can be adapted by engineers of any experience level. With features such as drag-and-drop, copy and paste, and the ability to import existing designs into the software without having to recreate them from scratch, electrical design software can help speed up any project.

Find Out More

For more information about EPLAN and how our advanced platform can help you make improvements at every stage of your electrical design process, please call one of our technical sales team today on 01709 704100 today.