The follow is an except from Control Design's eBook: "The Essentials of Data-Driven Automation Design."
Since their proliferation some 30 years ago, computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools have advanced significantly in their ability to improve the productivity of project engineers. The earliest software packages were each focused on a specific discipline, allowing mechanical, electrical, automation and other project engineering stakeholders to perform their individual tasks more accurately and efficiently. And while individual productivity is still an important deliverable of today’s more advanced CAE tools, the new frontier of project execution efficiency lies in the effective integration of engineering tasks—simultaneously across design disciplines as well as through time across the entire project lifecycle.
From project pre-planning through detailed engineering, assembly, commissioning and operation of industrial machines and entire production lines, a systems-level approach centered on powerful, unified design databases is allowing machine builders and end users to achieve a step-change in productivity not possible with yesterday’s siloed approaches. Together with bidirectional synchronization with other complementary information systems, these new tools and methodologies have demonstrated design costs savings of up to 80 percent, along with significant improvements in design integrity and project execution time.
The key to this sort of dramatic productivity gain lies in the ability of an integrated design approach to enable new business processes and workflows. For example, integrated automation design tools centered on a common database allow electrical, fluid power, process instrumentation and control engineers to work simultaneously on a project instead of sequentially. This level of integration and embedded coordination also allows closer collaboration among designers at multiple locations (even in multiple languages) and among suppliers, customers and engineering service providers.
Today’s integrated design tools also are reaching earlier in the project lifecycle to encompass the pre-planning, or front-end engineering and design (FEED), phase of project execution. This allows designers to build on early conceptual work in a consistent, integrative process rather than starting anew with different tools when a project enters its detailed engineering phase. And, on the back end of the design process, a data-driven approach allows automatic error-checking and automatic generation of all the documentation needed for subsequent steps in project execution. Last minute design changes can be automatically propagated across all aspects of the project, even across multiple organizations and supply chains.
If such efficiencies are to be gained for a one-off project, just think of the gains to be had on the next similar project. Indeed, a data-driven approach lends itself to standardized design templates that allow designers to scale and re use modular chunks of their previous work, slashing time and effort so significantly that a growing number of leading machine builders are strategically re-thinking their product designs to capitalize on the effect.
