How Does Evey One Else Do "It"

I am starting this thread to see how other people's departments are run. Every one has things they think there company does well and things they do that need improving, so this thread is to also help people learn from there pains and gains. Feel free to to also comment on places you think people could improve.

I will start....

Industry: Consumer Products
Number of Plants You Support: 30 across 9 sites
People in Your Department: 16
Department Name: Industrial Automation
Department Responsibilities: Support of all lines, inventory of spare parts, electrical design of all lines guilt in house, mechanical design by request / lines built completely in house, and project management of new lines.
Programmable Logic Controls Used: Allen Bradley Compaq Logix or Micro Logix 1500 (these are used in all new deployments). There older lines can have PLC 05, SLC500, DL05, DL205, S7, S5, FA2J
HMI: Panel View Plus, Panel View, Eaton Canvas, Wonder Ware InTouch, Visual Basic (.net, 5, 6), RS View SE
Electrical Drawings Software: Visio 2003 (Looking at switching to Solid Works or AutoCAD Electrical)
Mechanical Drawings Software: Visio 2003 (Looking at Solid Works or AutoCAD Inventor)
One thing you thing your department does well: Electrical documentation, are electrical drawings are easy to read for the plant maintenance and our team.
One thing you think your department can improve on: Design time. It takes to long to design some of the projects. We are looking at switching to some consolidated tools and automated tools. For example, we are finding some additional speed with 3d modeling and would like to use a single tool for all development.

Electrical Drawings Software: Visio 2003 (Looking at switching to Solid Works or AutoCAD Electrical)

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Solidworks is not good for the type of work we do. It is great for mechanical design. However if your using Visio it shouldn't be hard to find something better. I like Visio for flow charts and simple layouts but not for electrical drawings.

Bteachman said:

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Electrical Drawings Software: Visio 2003 (Looking at switching to Solid Works or AutoCAD Electrical)
Mechanical Drawings Software: Visio 2003 (Looking at Solid Works or AutoCAD Inventor)
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One thing you think your department can improve on: Design time.

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1 + 1 = ?

Autocad Electrical will have a major positive effect on your electrical design time, if you learn how to use it that is. I second Charles on solidworks. Absolutely fantastic for mechanical. Sucks for electrical. Autocad Electrical is possibly the best package on the market for industrial control drawing.

I'm the entire electrical controls/design team where I work. I can't imagine using Visio for drawings. I use standard ACAD 2006 but I could probably get away with ACAD lite.

Edit: If you have people that do nothing but make electrical prints, ACAD electrical is probably a good way to go.

One other thing. I would like to see more places seperate construction drawings from so called maintenance drawings. Far to often I see a set of drawings where 50% of the information is absolutely useless to the person who down the road has to troubleshoot and fix a machine. The final package that is delivered to the maintenance department doesn't need to include drawings of OP station layouts and control panel dimensions. We are already there because the damn thing is broke, we know what it looks like.

Is there any benefit to using AutoCAD Electrical and Inventory together?

Could not find any thing on there web site, but I may have missed it.

I've been leaning towards EPlan instead of a CAD-based package for schematics recently... yet I am still to see if it is worth it.

Thank you for the help so far.

Does any one use any packages that will let you design some thing, then set up all the comments for your I/O in your plc? I just think for some of this "There has to be a easier way".

I know what you mean by "there has to be an easier way". A person should only have to create the documentation once, and then push a few buttons to have it automatically populate all the applicable software being used for the project. My CTRL+C, CTRL+V muscles are overworked...

I have used excel frequently as the basis for device names and descriptions. It is easy to build a worksheet that will rearrange the information in a format that is importable for PB32 and for RSLogix.

I have been wanting to take it a step further and link the data to Autocad drawings too, but have not done that yet except for a few experiments.

Oh, on the other points: There are three of us responsible for programming, electrical design, troubleshooting and project management for 3 plants, but we are mainly focussed on the one there in OKC. Occasionally we design and program a system that gets shipped off to a sister plant.

We do a great job of keeping things running with minimal downtime. We don't always do a great job of planning projects. There is too much word of mouth info, and last minute changing of dates and details but somehow we pull it together.

Paul