Industry recognition is a big deal, so you’ll forgive us if we brag a bit about a recent accolade we received.

For the past 15 years, Control Design Magazine has published their Readers' Choice Awards. For the Class of 2015 Awards, they sent out nearly 18,000 ballots to their subscribers who have buying authority or influence for industrial control or automation products.

“Our readers are the people who build the machines that are installed in factories and assembly plants,” said Mike Bacidore, editor in chief of Control Design Magazine.

The survey used an unaided ballot, meaning that they were not given a choice of vendors, but rather wrote in their top two recommendations amongst 61 product categories. Categories included Circuit Protection, embedded Computer Systems, Network Routers and Switches and e-CAD software.

We’re proud to announce that EPLAN placed in the top three in the e-CAD software category.

“To be mentioned means that EPLAN is top of mind among the machine builder and system integrator community,” said Bacidore. “EPLAN is a very high quality solution. They’ve been to our offices and showed us their software, and the different applications of what people can do to reduce time to market and more efficiently handle the design and build phase for cabinets,” he continued.

 “We feel EPLAN continued to grow market share by at least 2 % to 4% putting us at +20%,” added Raymond Gaynor, president of EPLAN Americas. “This outstanding growth and recognition would not be possible without our One EPLAN team.  Our company’s success is driven by the hard work and dedication of all our employees: from Administrative to Marketing to Technical to Sales.”

In a conversation with Bacidore, he went on to discuss some of the reasons EPLAN is being embraced by his readers.

“It makes it much more cost effective for the machine builder to determine the best way to design the cabinet and makes it much faster and more cost effective to build the cabinet. You are able to automate that process of the building of the wiring itself as well. For machine builders that has a huge impact. To do it manually, is a very time consuming process.”

Bacidore also noted the global reach of the companies these machines are being designed for by sharing, “A lot of these are global companies that have plants all over the world. To use this software and have a digital record of what the project is, is a big advantage. You can share it electronically with your other plants. Those digital capabilities make it very cost effective for an international machine builder to share best practices and streamline the manufacturing process.”

This year’s Readers' Choice Awards also asked participants to rate the service and support of the vendors they use. Only companies that scored very good (4) to excellent (5) were included on this list. We are honored to see that EPLAN was the only company ranked as considered a service and support leader in the E-CAD Software Category.

“With this recognition, customers had an opportunity to award those suppliers for the great service they give pre and post sales,” added Bacidore. “When you see the service scores, it’s the top companies that are there.”

“Building cabinets has to be done,” concluded Badidore. “What better way then to work with a software that integrates that process.