While 20 per cent of the Wickman machines sent out from Coventry are custom-designed, it is still rare for two standard machines to leave the factory with identical configurations.

Wickman’s machines typically have a working lifespan of 40 or 50 years, making aftercare and service important elements of what the company offers. This includes providing spares for machines that it manufactured many decades ago as well as a comprehensive upgrading service to reconfigure existing machines with the latest technology. Key elements include adding CNC capabilities to them and upgrading their AC motor drives. While 20 per cent of the machines sent out from Coventry are custom-designed, it is still rare for two standard machines to leave the factory with identical configurations. This level of personalisation required the company to use an off-the-shelf CAD package for producing electrical drawings relating to how the newly fitted spindle motors and drives will operate.

However, the CAD system used tended to be more like a 2D drafting aid than a design tool. There was no way of cross-referencing or crosschecking connections on electrical drawings but more comprehensive CAD systems that offered these options were prohibitively expensive.

Macros and macro variants significantly speed up the creation of electrical schematics with the Electrical Engineering discipline from the WSCAD SUITE. Cabinet construction with Cabinet Engineering follows seamlessly; schematics from other electrical CAD systems can also be imported.

Keen to improve the turnaround times of its machines, Wickman wanted a CAD package that was not only cost-effective and powerful but also easy to use. After an extensive search of the industry, the company found that the best system on the market that met all its requirements was the WSCAD SUITE CAD/CAE package. Significantly faster than other CAD systems and with an intuitive operator interface, WSCAD proved popular with Wickman’s design engineers because it avoided overcomplicating the design process. Also, they were able to begin a project, save the work and come back to it at a later date without needing to ‘re-learn’ what they had been doing.

Other benefits included the elimination of human error and the ability to achieve greater accuracy levels than was previously possible, improving the consistency of drawings. The company’s designers appreciated working with a system that was designed-for-purpose rather than using one that needed to be ‘shoe-horned’ into an application. Clive Thorne, Control & Electrical Engineering Manager at Wickman Coventry, has been so impressed with WSCAD that he wouldn’t want to go back to the company’s previous CAD systems. “Ease of use was an extremely important factor when selecting a CAD system,” Clive says. “We have one person using the system for 20 per cent of their time and we didn’t want something that would require a week-long training exercise.

With WSCAD, basic training can be completed very quickly and there is no steep learning curve which means that everything is done much faster.”

Routing, calculation of wire lengths, filling degree of the cable channels are available on your fingertips when it comes down to the control cabinet layouts. Generated data are used for labelling and manufacturing of wires and cabinet enclosures on NC machines at no additional costs.

Clive adds: “Every machine we work on has a unique set of electrical drawings issued and they are created at the rate of one every month. However, most of the work involves reconfiguring existing components which means that often only minor changes are required. The WSCAD Software helps us operate within much shorter timeframes by making it easy to modify existing drawings and copy data in from one drawing to another.

At the same time, we are also able to send drawings out to customers that contain all the information required rather than having to put ‘if fitted’ next to an optional feature, such as a tool break detector.” One of the most impressive aspects of the WSCAD system for Wickman was its excellent functionality-for-price ratio. Just as the company felt it was impractical to spend many thousands of pounds on a sophisticated CAD system and thousands more on training, it believed that the costly add-on features offered by some alternative CAD systems would represent a level of “overkill” for a company of Wickman’s size which focuses almost exclusively on electrical engineering.

Other benefits for Wickman include the ability to integrate the WSCAD solution with other electrical CAD applications and IT systems, all backed by the “excellent” technical support from WSCAD that Clive Thorne describes as “beyond expectations”.

Wickman’s designers are among 35,000 users who have chosen the WSCAD SUITE as their preferred electrical CAD solution. They value the system’s structuring, standardisation, reuse and automation capabilities, which can be managed alongside WSCAD’s augmented reality app. Additionally, WSCAD’s integrated suitability for electrical engineering, cabinet engineering, process and fluid technology, building automation and electrical installation is also highly valued. This allows any changes made to a component in one discipline to be reflected and completed immediately in all the other disciplines.

Not only do these features reduce engineering time from several weeks to just a few hours (or even minutes) but they also ensure operators achieve a much higher quality of work. WSCAD is backed by the world’s largest electrical parts library wscaduniverse.com which saves designers time by removing the need to create their own symbols and parts. The library contains over 2.2 million data sets from over 457 manufacturers that can be accessed free of charge.

Wickman’s designers are among 40,000 users worldwide who have chosen the WSCAD Software as their preferred electrical CAD solution to speed up electrical engineering tasks within the design and production process of extremely precise, high quality machines.

The direct output of manufacturing data to Steinhauer NC machines avoids having to use additional CAD software.