The specialist for bulk material and process engineering Claudius Peters (CP) is at home in the cement, gypsum, coal, steel and aluminium industries. The company, which dates back more than 100 years, designs and manufactures storage bins, conveyors, silos, grinding and packing systems, gypsum homogenizers as well as bulk material engineering for different areas. The globally operating Claudius Peters Group is based in Buxtehude in the south of Hamburg.
From a document-oriented to a data-oriented approach
The decision in favour of AUCOTEC's system Engineering Base was made during an innovation project with the objective of developing CP into an outstanding company of the 21st century. Engineering Base's consistency, process acceleration and simultaneous increase in quality were decisive factors in this decision. Thanks to Engineering Base's open data model, the data is now CP’s central starting point of engineering, rather than the documents. They are just automatically resulting representations of the current status. "For us, Engineering Base is a success story and the foundation of the transformation of our software environment," explained Ulrich Cord, Group Manager Automation and Engineering Base Project Manager at CP Projects GmbH.
Smoothly simultaneous
The system fulfilled the most important requirement of the bulk material experts: the networking of their data and tools. Cord emphasized that Engineering Base has built interdisciplinary bridges and he spoke of a new culture of communication. The mutual understanding of process and electrical engineers has been significantly strengthened. "This has a positive influence on the design process." The simultaneous editing of a project works smoothly, even with 20 users. The common data model ensures that all information is up-to-date.
Engineering Base sets standards
After Engineering Base's implementation, the focus was on standardization by wisely anticipating and structuring components, modules and plant sections. When such ready-made standards are stored once in Engineering Base, project runtimes can be significantly reduced and new designers can more rapidly become familiar with the system.
Engineering Base can also improve the interaction of company-wide software tools such as ERP and 3-D and further reduce redundant data maintenance. Being the source of all engineering data, Engineering Base also feeds the service platform CATALOGcreator by TID Informatik. CP uses it to provide live data of more than 8,000 projects from Engineering Base, ERP, PDM, and DMS to customers all around the world.
Also in terms of Industry 4.0, CP will use Engineering Base's possibilities, for example, when linking design data with operational and malfunction data. Ulrich Cord's conclusion: "Engineering Base supports our engineering consistently and intelligently. Thus, in the long term also, we will more than fulfil our mission statement of providing 'world-class engineering for world-class customers'."
