Customisation Drives Engineering Complexity

The standardisation and modularisation of the product range is intended to allow customised solutions to be offered for the most diverse requirements quickly and inexpensively. A product configurator created especially for Caterpillar supports and enables the sales team to create complete and customised plants and offers with optimised equipment for specific needs within a very short time frame. However, due to the many aggregates and combinations involved, the electrical design process is not simplified and, as a result, becomes even more cumbersome and complex. While Sales can act and respond quickly by using the configurator, the pressure on the technical departments actually increases. Having more than 20 possible languages for the plans and documentation and the well-known shortage of skills across the board does not alleviate the situation.

Caterpillar Energy Solutions stands for highly efficient and eco-friendly solutions for distributed power generation, and manufactures gas engines, electricity power plants, as well as CHP plants.

Automating Electrical Design to Overcome Engineering Bottlenecks

The efforts by Caterpillar to automate the development and construction process go back a long way. In the first step, the use of macros and macro variants reduced the lead time for an average project with several hundred pages from several weeks to about one week. In addition to the electrical CAD solution from WSCAD, the Project Wizard add-on also allows the automatic creation of plans; the processing time was reduced further to about one day. But even these six to eight hours could not resolve the bottleneck in the long run: new series and products needed to be developed, and the responses to changing customer requirements had to be significantly faster. Another issue that the designers faced was the fact that they had to collect and record many of the details from the sales and project management processes as well as already existing data in the organisation for electrical engineering. “Our objective was simple and clear: we were looking for a solution with which we could create the overall electrical planning and documentation without manual intervention and with minimal effort“, said Andreas Dworzsak, electrical engineer and developer at Caterpillar Energy Solutions, when describing the initial situation.

Seven MWM gas gensets from Caterpillar Energy Solutions provide power for the water supply of the 3.7-million-strong metropolis of Melbourne. The electrical engineering planning and documentation for the machines and systems are done using the electrical CAD solution from WSCAD.

A Solution Without Replacing the Existing Configurator

As a possible solution, the favoured idea was to get the electrical CAD software to prepare all plans and documentation fully directly from within the product configurator. With this requirement in hand, Caterpillar initially turned to a well-known vendor on the market. Their solution was short and sweet: to replace the customised configurator that was individually created for Caterpillar by their own proprietary product. But this would have meant the entire transfer of know-how from the currently used tool to the new product in addition to the purchase of a new configurator. Too time-consuming and too expensive. Especially since a transition from the WSCAD software to the electrical CAD solution of the new provider, including all documents, would have been mandatory. In the second attempt, Caterpillar Energy Solutions therefore approached WSCAD and was welcomed with open ears.

Circuit diagrams, control cabinet assemblies and much more: The complete electrical engineering planning and documentation of the cogeneration power plants occurs with the respective disciplines from the WSCAD software.

Automated Engineering from Any Product Configurator

The Management and Development at WSCAD recognised the need immediately and agreed to create, in close cooperation with Caterpillar, an interface to which the currently used product configurator can dock and initiate the fully automatic preparation of plans and documentation through the WSCAD software. The result, a year later, is now a new add-on product called the Automation Interface. This upstream interface to the WSCAD software is the connection to any product configuration system on the market. Whether the configurator is in the ERP or PDM system or a special software program such as that from Acatec, or the custom development of Caterpillar, is totally irrelevant. At the touch of a button, the configured product with all the relevant data for the electrical engineering process is passed to the WSCAD software and converted into a valid command language for the WSCAD software.

In addition to the technical parameters, even the target language of the documentation is set in the configurator and sent to the WSCAD software to generate the electri-cal engineering documentation at the touch of a button.

Automated Documentation in Silent Mode

As if by magic, the complete documentation is created effortlessly. It is possible to do exactly what can be done manually with WSCAD. The entire process runs as a background process in “silent mode“. The WSCAD software does not need to be started, and even the users themselves need not be present during the creation of the plans. Configuring rather than programming – or software controlling software – a step toward Industry 4.0 or the Internet of Things in engineering. If time is scarce, the requisite knowledge for connecting any configurator to the Automation Interface can be procured from WSCAD as a service.

Configuring instead of designing: All electrical plans, including the documentation of several hundred pages for an individually configured CHP are created in the background in the WSCAD software directly from within the product configurator at the push of a button within seconds.

From Testing to Production: Automated Design at the Touch of a Button

Following the successful completion of the test phase, the new type of electrical design at Caterpillar Energy Solutions is now being introduced in the production phase. Plans, including documentation, are created in the set languages at the touch of a button. The generated PDFs and lists are placed in the predefined directories. “We can now plan without having to be familiar with WSCAD“ says Andreas Dworzsak. “Just push the button, and WSCAD generates the complete documentation for any configuration in the desired language. So we now have more resources free for design and do not have to outsource design tasks to the previous extent. In addition, we can focus more on special solutions for upcoming projects that are not standard and require a major design effort. This enables us to win new orders.”

In addition to the technical parameters, even the target language of the documentation is set in the configurator and sent to the WSCAD software to generate the electrical engineering documentation at the touch of a button.