What Constitutes Great Design in Automated Systems?
What is Great Design?
Design is a critical process in creating any automated system. You might think of design as just electrical drawings and panel layouts, which it is, but there is so much more that goes into it.
Providing the best design is a combination of customer needs and our knowledge of the required components. The more information provided or gathered the better end result. We work hand in hand with our automation engineers and electricians to meet functional specifications in a way that can physically be accomplished – and easily maintained.
“A great design is an ongoing endeavor maintained for a piece of equipment’s life. It sets the future up for success, with all the information concise, accurate, and available.”
How does great design start?
Knowing what you have and what the desired end result is. Is this a brand new system? Is it an existing system? Planning for upgrades and retrofits is fact of life in automation. Equipment gets outdated. More efficient methods are available. Machines get re-purposed. The first step in any change, regardless of circumstances, is knowing what is there. Was there I/O, motors, or other components added or removed? What kind of reconfiguration has happened? Is there still space in that existing enclosure? Data gathering either via vendors, specifications sheets, or field investigation/verification is a crucial step in design. Suprises cost money in the design world, knowing what you have and what you want helps to eliminate them.
What makes a design great?
Our philosophy is to focus on the future end user. Not the programmer who has spent the last month learning the ins and outs of the functionality. Not the electricians that have been studying the project weeks before installation. Not the engineer on the customer side who has been approving everything along the way. We design for the maintenance technician 5 years from now, coming to fix the machine with no prior knowledge. How many pages do they need to flip through to find the information they need for troubleshooting? Is the information in the drawings accurate? Is the information clear in a manor that is easy for apprentices to follow? Focusing on these aspects of design help make maintenance be more effective in a shorter amount of time; reducing production downtime.
Installation can be a very stressful time for all involved. The best way to alleviate concerns and help things go smoothly is a well thought out plan. Installation documentation helps electricians know important information such as panel locations, cable runs to be completed, the number of field components installed, or even special instructions specific to the project. Installation or demolition drawings to help specify what work needs to be completed. Even onsite support to kick off installations providing electricians an on site source to ask questions can be the effort that brings a project to success.
What do you do once your system is complete?
Maintain the drawings. It is easy to let a physical copy of drawings with mark ups on it be good enough for a machine. Sometimes they last 30yrs this way. The hard part comes when a change is needed. As mentioned above many things can be altered in a system that makes this a challenge, but drawings kept up to date with as accurate as possible information makes it so much less painful, and costly. A small cost to have drawings maintained as changes are made might save big when large modifications are made in the future. If you can’t rely on the drawings, you have to spend way more time determining how the current system operates; or worse accept a higher risk of failure due to unknowns.
To summarize, a great design is an ongoing endeavor maintained for a piece of equipment’s life. It sets the future up for success, with all the information concise, accurate, and available.