Automated enclosure manufacturing

Schubert Elektroanlagen is one of the largest Austrian providers of equipment in electrical systems for the energy, environment, water and plant engineering sectors. Already founded in 1965, the company secures its competitive position through an automated development and manufacturing process in which planning and 3D design with EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Cabinet is followed by the sheet metal forming and cable preparation. Automatically and with direct data transfer from the EPLAN software. Obergrafendorf, approximately 20 kilometers south-west of St. Pölten, is well-known for two reasons: Amongst railroad enthusiasts for its functions as a junction station where two railroad lines, both narrow-gauge, cross. Amongst plant engineers as the headquarters of Schubert Elektroanlagen GmbH, a leading manufacturer of switch- and controlgear, by no means narrow-gauge. The company is amongst the few vendors who can offer a complete package of services in EI&C technology (electrical equipment, instrumentation technology and control technology) from a single source. With the four sectors of energy, environment, water and plant engineering they equip facilities that have a stable future. These include hydroelectric power plants, high- and medium-voltage installations, power distribution systems and industrial plants in the field of energy, waste-waste treatment, sewage, composting and waste incineration plants in the environmental field and water supply, water treatment, snow-making and irrigation plants in the field of water. Their business activities cover the complete spectrum of electrical planning and are supplemented by the complete project realization of the mechanical plant equipment including piping in the plant engineering field. Competitiveness through consistent CAE
One of the most important and most traditional activities of the company is enclosure manufacturing - this has been pursued for the last 43 years on site. Currently enclosure systems with 20,000 m2 of mounting panel surface are produced annually on 3,400 m2 of production surface. The Production Manager, Mr. Manfred Bandion, has been in the company for 32 years. "We are competitive internationally even against low-wage countries thanks to our excellent quality and the extremely short production times that we can guarantee through the consistent use of CAE and CAM - from the design stage through the production to the documentation", he describes the unique selling points of Schubert. This begins at Schubert with the planning and design of the power supply and switchgear systems that are planned completely with EPLAN Electric P8 at 6 workplaces. "We have been using EPLAN's electrical design software for many years" reports Mr. Bandion. "We were one of the first companies in Austria to switch to EPLAN Electric P8." The reason for this step was the notable improvements in speed, consistency and efficiency that could be achieved by using the new EPLAN Platform. "Thanks to its database-based structure, EPLAN Electric P8 provides us with much greater flexibility - thus allowing us to respond much faster to short-term customer wishes" says Mr. Bandion. "The software supports us in the process through the extensive check mechanisms as well as through the possibility of directly integrating manufacturer data as macros without notable effort." Schubert also played a leading role in introducing EPLAN Cabinet in which the mechanical layout and structure of the enclosures are created in 3D from the schematic data and the data related to mechanical dimensions and the position of the connection points from the parts database. Even before the official market introduction of the new EPLAN Cabinet, the company was involved in the final phase of the product development as a beta tester. It is a matter of course in the company that the enclosures from different manufacturers are designed in 3D on four workstations. "The simple and exact positioning of all the components, from the power distribution rail systems to the smallest accessories, with the integrated collision check function is a considerable advancement compared to the previous working method", says Mr. Bandion. "However, the use of this helpful tool at Schubert goes far beyond the pure enclosure design." From software to sheet metal forming
On the input side the direct access to bills of materials from EPLAN Electric P8 through the common platform is of considerable assistance compared to designing with classical CAD systems, as is the possibility of importing enclosure data, also with partial equipping into the system. On the output side EPLAN Cabinet provides not only accurate design documents but also NC data to drilling and milling machines. Such a machine has already been in use at Schubert since 2001. "At that time this was a milestone in the development of the company", Mr. Bandion remembers. "Thanks to the interface available by default in EPLAN Cabinet, since 2007 the design drawings are passed after approval directly to the 4-axis CNC machining center that ensures holes and cut-outs with a tenth of a millimeter precision". The completely drilled mounting panels as well as the correctly cut-out doors for the enclosures are thus produced directly before equipping in a highly economical fashion and nevertheless "just in time". On route with perfect cabling
An important function of EPLAN Cabinet is the routing function. As soon as the components have been placed, the optimal route for laying the cables in the enclosure is determined. As short as possible, but taking the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) into consideration. The result is a specification for each individual required wire with the designation and length for the cable preparation. Since the beginning of 2008, cable preparation is carried out fully automatically at Schubert using a Komax Zeta 633 for 36 different wire types from 0.5 to 6 mm². On this novel wire preassembly machine the wires are not only cut to specification and provided with wire ferrules but also labeled fully automatically. On the one hand this saves money through the manual labor that is no longer required as well as improved reliability for installation, on the other hand it is the most elegant way to observe standards relating to the identifiability of cables and wires at every connection point. But this wouldn't be Schubert if this machine were not integrated completely in the automated manufacturing process: After the wires have been calculated in EPLAN Cabinet, these are combined into logical wire bundles and their specification transferred via an interface created by EPLAN to the wire preassembly machine. "Thanks to the link between the wire preassembly machine and EPLAN Cabinet we were are to extend the continuity of computer-aided development another step further into the manufacturing process", Mr. Bandion notes with pleasure. "This means that we are even more in a position than in the past to provide the best quality to our customer at competitive prices."