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Guide for Electrical CAD

By James Glass

When Is the Right Time to Get Started with Electrical CAD Software?

As you’re planning to purchase or update your electrical CAD software, you’ll be deciding what are the essential factors and features for choosing the correct software solution.

It´s not a good idea to go out and buy just any electrical CAD software without first researching what your business requirements are. With rapid, modern technology developments, such decisions take time, usually over a time period, and everyone involved in this decision must be able to realise that a good electrical CAD software investment pays off for the future of a business.

Functionality is clearly the top criteria for selecting a good electrical CAD software, but other considerations should factor into your decision-making. By this time, you should have an excellent idea of what many of those considerations are. Also, look past the product features to its history of development. Examine how often new releases come out, and the quantity of major-to-minor releases.

Check out the major new functionality implemented in the past few releases. Does the software developer issue prompt and easy-to-install patches to address problems? Also, touch base with current users of the product. What problems do they run into? What do they most like about the product? How responsive do they perceive the vendor to be?

Key Factors

Intelligent & Efficient Software When deciding on an electrical CAD software for your business, it is necessary to find out how efficient each software package is at creating the types of projects your company makes.

For example, if your company makes machinery you should see how easy it is to integrate your electrical and mechanical projects with the right software. If your firm works sizing electrical projects, check out the compatibility between your calculation and your design software for faster time-to-market.

Changes often occur in the project design process, so it’s essential to make this as efficient and reliable as possible. Eliminating unnecessary steps in your current project process can add significant cost benefits to your business and the design being produced as time is money.

Compatibility with Customers & Suppliers In today’s design industries, few manufacturers do not have the ability to be vertically integrated in the design process to final product. Many depend on a global collection of suppliers for tools, parts, subsystems, production equipment, and design services.

A lot of businesses or customers complain about the slow conversion process required for sharing files with others, who cannot open your current system file formats.

The benefits of exchanging electrical CAD files with customers and suppliers is enormous. CAD drafting trends are always changing. It is essential to find out how easy it is to import or export file properties and bills of materials (BOMs).

Look at each system’s ability to import files from other systems. Ideally, your electrical CAD software should be able to exchange information (import and export files) in formats such as .PDF, .XLS, .DWG, or .DXF.

Over 75% of our customers would recommend our solutions and services to others…

Consistent Manufacturer’s Data Certified Product Data is mandatory and essential nowadays due to the advantage of cutting lists for downstream purchasing and manufacturing operations. Reducing time to market for your design, while at the same time speeding up and simplifying your design process – increasing productivity.

To reduce time-to-market and generate consistent bill of materials (BOM), validate your electrical CAD counts on consistent data from the main manufacturers (symbols, catalogs, 2D and 3D layouts), and keep it consistent throughout your design. Keep your data organized so you can work in teams, work in parallel, and react faster to design changes.

Change a design once in the project and it may cause a ripple effect, in terms of updates, through the entire drawing project. To keep everyone on schedule and reduce costly stops in production from incorrect part counting, identification, and ordering – export or link BOM data to manufacturing resource planning (MRP), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or data management systems.

Ensuring consistent projects with certified data enables robust and detailed BOMs. Having an automatic BOM that is always up to date means you never have to worry about manually updating it.

Error Verification

The detection of errors during the project life cycle saves costly time and money. Without the correct and necessary error detection, project work with combined efforts becomes a waste of time for everyone involved and puts pressure on any project team.

Cost-Free Correction of Program Errors
Avoiding some of the common errors found in electrical CAD software such as:

  • Duplicated parent symbols
  • Duplicated connection points
  • Components with circuit not assigned to a manufacturer part
  • Equipotential conflicts
  • Wires without mark
  • Empty terminal strips
  • Voltage drop in cables

For example, checking the design rules (reports) manually allows you to see errors as you progress in your project, although it is possible to see a visual warning with equipotential conflicts (dots you can configure – size and colour). Also, if you rename an item manually and the name already exists, you will have the corresponding warning message. This not only saves time but costs.

Further benefits:
1. Error verification lowers the number of possible defects in later stages of project development.
2. Reduces the chances of failures in the project.
3. Helps build project specifications as it develops.

Drafting Tools That Meet Your Standards A project’s productivity and effectiveness is essential to develop, test, manufacture, deliver, use, and support throughout its life, while working with project-related information.

Ensure that you create your own project standards to help unify your documentation and create consistent projects. Be sure any 2D electrical CAD software you buy can export your drawings in popular formats such as PDF, DXF, and DWG.

One way to quickly get to the bottom of what an electrical CAD software offers is to ask for a competitive benchmark.

More typically, your key users within your business can be provided with an evaluation version of the electrical CAD software for at least a few days so they can test it against their own models and processes to assess viability.

Over 36% of customers said that technical support implementation time was considered important…
Over 40% of recently surveyed customers prefer Engineering Analysis, Libraries, Catalogues, Layout, and Time Saving when choosing an efficient electrical CAD software…

Integration with IT Systems Make sure your IT business systems are compatible with your electrical CAD software, and allow collaboration among them. Systems such as ERP, MCAD, and PLM should be able to exchange data with your electrical CAD software.

Mistakes caused by bad collaboration of exchange data can waste hundreds of hours of work each year and cost money, in terms of defective parts if a project is near completion.

Why is it important to integrate PDM, ERP, and MCAD with ECAD?
For example, integrating MCAD, PDM, and ERP offers business efficiency and value:

  • Ensuring consistency and use of project-related information, by using rules to create your own projects to overcome problems and offer solutions.
  • Reducing the time to bring new and better projects to market at a lower cost while improving quality.
  • Creating and using common project-related terminology and processes throughout the business.

Over 55% of surveyed customers found that technical features were very important when selecting the appropriate software…

Pricing

An electrical CAD software must efficiently and accurately represent every part in your company’s project and the intricate relationship of the design process between each department involved.

To increase efficiency, designers should be able to design a quality project of their chosen software with as few steps as possible. The cost of reliable software solutions will guarantee a better outcome for your business.

Purchasing a modular electrical CAD software can benefit some businesses, however doing it this way adds great costs to the overall software and services you might expect.

Find the right electrical CAD software package – in the long run, you will avoid extra costs. This way there are many benefits, in terms of contracted services to technical support etc., that will be effective from day one and over the future.

Over 40% of surveyed customers highlighted that price was also an important factor when selecting a CAD software…

Technical Support

Make sure that you can customise technical support to achieve an overall effective result for any software issues. It is also important that the response time for an answer to your question is fast.

Core benefits of having technical support:
- Access unlimited, no-cost technical support when you require it.
- Increase your knowledge of your software.
- Learn to navigate the software effectively.

Channels of Technical Support Support can be in the form of phone call, chat, or email. Various electrical CAD software offer one, two, or all three. It is always best to look for a system that covers customer needs as part of their service.

  • On-site – Technicians should also be available for installation, application analysis, and company-specific advice.
  • e-Support – Users should have direct access to a ticket-based support system through their software or provider website.

Over 75% of our customers use our email service for technical support…
Over 80% of our users are satisfied with our support services…

Short Learning Curve

Adopting an electrical CAD software requires training and experience. By choosing a solution that’s easy to learn as well as capable of meeting your business needs, you save time and money.

A good electrical CAD software provides an intuitive user interface that helps you easily find the functionality you need. This enables faster project design, standardisation in drafting practices, and more effective communication between contributors.

Integration

It is important that the development of the software being offered continuously follows general technical development.

Learning and becoming expert in an electrical CAD software is important when calculating Return on Investment (ROI).

Increase your ROI by 500% using a reliable electrical CAD software:
- Faster design iterations
- Design with fewer errors
- Reduction of time spent on project
- Faster time to market
- Reduced workload volumes

Innovative R&D to Protect Your Investment Computing technology is constantly evolving. If your electrical CAD software provider ignores this, you’ll soon find that your business is running outdated and costly software.

That´s why Trace Software International is one of the most respected providers of electrical CAD software due to its world-class evolving technology innovation along with R&D departments.

Buy from a supplier that has a proven record of being industry leaders in supplying software solutions for your business.

Want to increase your business potential? Contact us