Flottweg is one of the world's leading suppliers of systems for clarifying and separating liquids as well as for concentrating and dewatering. With a passion for perfection, Flottweg has been producing durable, high-performance industrial centrifuges and belt presses for over 60 years. After more than 40 years on the US and Canadian markets, the German-based company opened its US head office in Kentucky in 2008. The wholly owned subsidiary also maintains five sales branches in the USA. It uses Engineering Base (EB) for its design planning.
Before: manual labor and data losses
Flottweg projects often require custom-tailored electrical design. "For a long time, we have been using a tool for our projects that is very drawing-oriented. With this tool, a lot of time was spent error checking our projects due to discrepancies in our BOM, field wire terminal reports, and the incorrect updating of parts on our layout diagram," reports Jake York, Senior Electrical & Controls Engineer at Flottweg's US head office. Wiring information was entered manually because the data could not be trusted. To revise a few parts in a project, the engineers had to expect regular software crashes, data losses and reboots.
After: automatically error-free
@ Flottweg SEJake York understood that he needed a substantially better engineering solution. His first contact with the software platform EB made him hesitate because of the assumed work and time it would take to convert to different software. However, the flexibility, ease of use, and organization of EB quickly convinced him and his team that the investment would be worth it.
Thanks to its database, EB updates all associated project views in the event of changes, automatically and without errors. It makes no difference whether the change was made in a table, a graphic or Explorer. "In EB, reports are live data in the worksheets and, as a result, we completely eliminate the effort of creating reports. The fact that updates are performed automatically with no effort and without errors was pivotal in our decision," states York. "After the conversion, we now design our projects with ease at Flottweg."
From 8 to 2 hours
Flottweg has all common parts set up in the catalog with preferred master shapes tied to them for easy drag and drop and component replacement. "For projects that used to take us 8-12 hours, we now only need 2-6 hours with EB. That is a time savings of 50-75%," says Jake York.
