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The lack of qualified personnel affects companies in various sectors. The effects are particularly noticeable in control and switchgear construction. "Since many orders have very small lot sizes and follow individual customer specifications - often it is a one-off production - qualified employees are an absolute must", says Nicholas Visser-Plenge, General Manager of Plenge GmbH from Oelde, Germany.
Manual activities despite increasing complexity in switchgear construction?
The increasing complexity of control technology and its components, customer requests for individualisation, standards, last-minute changes and tight delivery deadlines are putting control cabinet construction under strong cost pressure. At the same time, another problem is exacerbating the shortage of skilled workers: many activities in the workshop are still carried out by hand. "The fact that a trained electrician cuts cable ducts and mounting rails to length and screws them onto a mounting plate is anything but efficient," emphasizes Visser-Plenge.
According to the study "Switch cabinet construction 4.0" by the Institute for Control Technology of Machine Tools and Production Facilities at the University of Stuttgart, around half of the production time in switch cabinet construction is spent on wiring alone. Here, too, many personnel capacities are tied up.
Automation with integrated database, ECAD and system solutions
If there is a lack of skilled personnel, the automation of production steps can help. "The decisive factor here is a digital database that is continuously enriched during the entire planning process and is also seamlessly available in the subsequent process steps," explains Thomas Weichsel, Head of Product Management at EPLAN. On this basis, the EPLAN Pro Panel engineering software can be used to create a digital prototype of the fully assembled control cabinet. "This serves as the basis for calculating the installation paths for the wiring. The lengths of the wires are also calculated in this way. With solutions such as the Rittal Wire Terminal WT, wire assembly is then fully automated," says Thomas Weichsel. Now the labor-intensive manual wiring can also be optimized well: EPLAN Smart Wiring supports the employees step by step - for example by tablet, directly at the workplace.
Another typical example of automation is the processing of flat parts of the control cabinet. NC-supported machining centres such as those from the Perforex series from Rittal Automation Systems have been specially developed for these tasks in switchgear construction. Switch cabinets are individually adapted to the requirements by drilling, milling, laser cutting and thread cutting. Plenge invested in such a Perforex LC (Laser Center) machining center in 2018. This has resulted in a significant increase in the efficiency of mechanical processing. Of the two previous employees who were deployed for this purpose, one can now take on other tasks in the workshop. "One of the prerequisites for all this to work smoothly is the consistency of data management from electrical planning to work preparation and production to the ERP system," says Visser-Plenge.
Optimising the integrated vale chain with engineering software
It is therefore usually not enough to just look at a single link in the value chain in order to make production processes more effective. Thomas Weichsel also emphasizes this: "The greatest potential for increasing the efficiency of processes currently lies above all in improved interaction between product development and production. To achieve this, it is first necessary to have end-to-end digitalization along the process chain. The standardization of data and interfaces then ensures the consistency of the data in all process steps and across the entire value chain - the prerequisites for automation and maximum process efficiency.
Short-term changes to the schematic via EPLAN Pro Panel are automatically updated for further processing in EPLAN Smart Wiring.
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