The Austrian machine manufacturer Zimmer Austria is the world's leading manufacturer of plants for printing and coating textiles and carpets. The company has been using AUCOTEC software solutions since 1992, most recently the ELCAD system for creating control cabinet construction documents. Switching to the database-based, object-oriented Engineering Base platform (EB) now equips Zimmer for its increasingly complex planning tasks and further growth.
Efficiency for batch size 1
For more than 140 years, the Kufstein company has been configuring and manufacturing individual machines for a wide range of applications and requirements of customers from all over the world. The diverse requirements make each machine a one-off. This places the highest demands on the engineering and its efficiency. So Zimmer Austria has switched to EB. "This way we are well prepared for the future," says Josef Ehammer, Head of Electrical Design.
Easy to handle, multifunctional
© Zimmer AustriaThe change has brought a significantly higher level of automation on several levels at once. The basis for this is the central plant model in EB that all those involved can work on simultaneously. It always shows everyone the current planning status. Changes to one part of the documentation appear immediately in every other representation of the changed object. In addition to electrical planning, the development department also uses EB for laboratory and machine tools.
After only two days of training, the users were able to work independently with EB. "Even if you haven't used it for a few weeks, finding your way around EB is much easier than with the old system," says Mr Ehammer. Symbols can not only be created faster, but also easily reused thanks to EB's database. Whereas in the past, many identical order items had to be entered individually, today one entry is sufficient.
Simply international
EB communicates directly with the ordering system, which just has to trigger the order. Conversely, EB receives item numbers and order data from there and automatically assigns them to the individual components. This way, users can see all the information assigned to a device at a click.
In addition, the market leader with a 95% export rate benefits from EB's multilingualism. The platform offers a wide range of languages and also allows the import of technical terms in any language, e.g. from the ordering system. In addition, switching between different standards and customer or country-specific labelling requirements is also done with just a click of the mouse.
