Velux Discovers Quick and Easy Electrical Design Tools

Marc Wilson, principal of Velux LLC, has helped a range of manufacturers across the United States with complex and sophisticated electrical design, schematic development, and automation consulting services, geared to automate production processes more fully.

“Customers typically want things done their way, which extends all the way down to their specific part numbering system and the manner in which they want labels done on schematics,” says Wilson. He needed a “robust yet flexible” electrical design and schematic development application to enable working in both 2D and 3D, each with different numbering/labeling configurations.

Though he had used AutoCAD® Electrical and EPLAN®, Wilson chose SOLIDWORKS® Electrical Schematic and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D design software “What I liked about SOLIDWORKS Electrical is that it includes 2D tools for creating schematics,” says Wilson. The product also has 3D tools for laying out electrical panels and configuring wire/cable harnesses and provides high-quality schematics and drawings that customers can understand. Plus, Wilson recalls, “…a lot of stuff happens quickly and easily [in SOLIDWORKS], which had not been my experience using other electrical design packages.”

Manufacturing companies are increasingly looking to further automate production to save time, requiring more complex electrical designs and corresponding schematics. “SOLIDWORKS Electrical software helps me automate certain things, such as linking it to Microsoft® Excel® to automatically generate inputs/outputs for programmable logic controllers,” Wilson notes.

Wilson boosted throughput on the machine for applying tax stamps on certain taxable commodities by 25 percent for one client. For this, he holds the patent. For another client, he imported the entire library of 40,000 Allen-Bradley parts using filters in SOLIDWORKS Electrical to quickly find the specific components needed, along with part numbers and the essential descriptive information.

“Almost every company has its own numbering and labeling system for electrical components, and I’m often working on multiple projects with different numbering/labeling configurations at the same time,” Wilson explains.

“With SOLIDWORKS Electrical software, I can have all of these projects open at the same time and drag and drop common features from project to project,” Wilson points out. “You can’t do that with other packages, and the ability to reuse data in SOLIDWORKS Electrical allows me to cut the time required to create a schematic in half.”

In a growing number of cases, wiring and harnessing are part of a complex system with complicated harnessing, such as including four to five cable bundles in each harness. “Yet even with complex harnessing systems, the ability to reuse data in SOLIDWORKS Electrical saves time,” Wilson stresses. “With SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D software, I can utilize the same electrical system, or cable harnessing approach, that supports automation on two different machines. I can drag and drop portions of one design into another.”

“In short, SOLIDWORKS Electrical solutions give me the agility and flexibility required to better serve my customers while staying ahead of the competition.”