ECT Promis-E

Has anyone used ECT Promis-E for schematic design? It looks very impressive on the web site :

www.ecti.com

Thanks!

TM

We have Promis-E here.

My advice is simple:
STAY AWAY!

After 3 years of using it, I seem to be able to shortcut my way around most of the bugs, but it still isn't really up to scratch. We have to get a little creative with the symbols we use (It seems to have a nice database of AB parts, but no other PLCS) and wire numbers. If only we had the spare money to change systems!!!

In short, it does look impressive (my boss got sucked in anyway...) and it does serve its purpose for the occasional user, but has too many bugs. Stay away if you have the choice.

Hi Tim

It look nice on the web site I use something called ECLT its very old sofware since 1994 it base on AutuCad LT 2.But it work graet.
Far as I understand they dont have new version in English.
The name is very similar so I thought they have new one.
What I suggest you ask for demo try it and let us know.
I dont think they will send me demo to Israel.and I dont expect to be in the States at soon.
Please let me know also what the price, its not show on their site.

You may want to try http://www.viadevelopment.com

Now owned by autodesk. It works great and right in autocad. You don't need the product to work in the drawings, but it makes it easier.

I've used it.

It's nice, and it makes doing some things very easy. I like being able to take a relay contact, drop it on a line, and have the line cut into two, each terminating at the termination points, and renumber automatically.

On the other hand, the more features of it you use, the more work you have to do.

If you have lots of different kinds of devices in your panels, then you have to spend extra time creating those devices (wich may only be used for the one project) so that it has the proper attachment points.

If you use the "Panel Layout" feature, then you have to provide the database with the spacial dimensions as well.

If you use the "Pricing" feature, then you have to update the database with the new prices every six months when the new catalog prices come out.

And so on. Then there's the up-front commitment that will go into creating all the things that you'll want to do to customize it to the way you do business. Titleblocks. Common parts (that aren't part of the standard library). Symbols that you've been using for years (and like).

Plus training, learning curve slowdown to productivity.

As I said, the program is nice. But I don't know that the ROI is there to justify it. And ROI is king (if you'll pardon the bilingual pun)

I must agree with The_Wanderer. When I started doing all of my own electrical drawings the company purchased Promise-E. It was supposed to increase productivity but it was cumbersome to learn and use. After several months of using it I went back to using just plain old ACAD with a few LISP routines and wblocks that I created or borrowed. About a year and a half ago we bought VIA WD. I found it much easier to use and I would highly recommend it. VIA was bought by AutoDesk and they now offer WD as AutoCAD Electrical 2004. I have it also and like it, the only thing I don’t like is the price tag of 5 grand.

You may want to take a look from "The Constructor" available at Koldwater Technologies, LLC.

It is very easy to use and includes a symbol editor. Designed specifically for motor control drawings.

I agree that Promise is just what the name suggests.
Our company was trying to improve productivity by investing
in electrical cad package and they made us try bunch of
different ones. We still use ACAD because none of them offered
any benefit over use of ACAD. Sure one or the other would have
nicer one thing or another (like printing, crossreferencing etc.)
but in average all of them were as fast as ACAD (what you loose on
manual crosreferencing, you make up on better editor environment
and more features of the ACAD).

We used VIA and seam to be not too bad, but it was unstablele
as hell. It used to crash on a dayly basis and time gained
on VIA features was lost to constant recovery of the project.
Maybe things are better today but I've had enough...

SEE from IGE+XIO was nice too (on the first look) but it failed
miserably on a long term. Product is just not stable and portable
enough. Many of the options are still french even in english
version and despite all patches they emailed. Default print is
in color which is not only more expencive because of color
toner but it takes longer to complete. Yes you can change this
but you had to change it color by color on every project you
create. Another really annoying thing was lack of editing(!!!) power.
You can easily *create* some drawing but if you ever decide to
edit it, it might be faster just to delete the whole page and
redo it from scratch. Again, it was more frust than lust...

IMHO all systems we tried were lacking what they promised:
productivity, stability, flexibility and/or compatibility to ACAD.
(Promise, EZ, SEE, VIA,...)

Although I'm quite happy with ACAD I would still like to find
something better if available so if someone is using a product
(and is happy with it), please let me know...

That is weird; I have never had any problems with VIA crashing on me. Maybe it was a fault of your OS? Before we upgraded to Windows 2000 Pro and VIA I have had just plain ACAD occasionally just shut down for no reason.

I have had zero problems with stability starting when the Via product was from CIMLogic.

I will maintain if you do any volume of drawings in ACAD (all of our customers demand that format), you aren't interested in making money if you don't use SOME kind of package.

Our package has made us thousands of dollars over the years.

I also have zero problems with stability with a package called Electra 2005.

Has everything that other expensive packages have but much much more easier and faster to use.