Komatsu Germany GmbH is one of the leading manufacturers of hydraulic excavators for the opencast mining industry. The scope of electrical engineering for a fully hydraulic diesel excavator is over 500 pages. Control and monitoring electronics require a software system such as Engineering Base (EB) that can cope with complexity.
Question: what disciplines do you cover with Engineering Base?
Martin Baer: "Both the electrical engineering and hydraulics and electrical installation."
What has changed in your processes since the introduction of Engineering Base?
"Tasks from production or documentation are shifted to design and forward to processes that take place earlier."
What effect does this shift have?
“By moving production or documentation tasks, the repeated time training other people can be reduced. And, of course, transmission errors are also avoided."
Why does the cooperation of all departments involved work so well?
"Engineering Base is currently used exclusively in design. Production and documentation, however, are interested in EB viewers in order to be able to use EB functionalities without changing the database."
Were you able to achieve your expected objectives with Engineering Base?
"The objectives at that time were to use an integrated, error-free and faster system for creating circuit diagrams. EB is now fully integrated and enables virtually error-free work. Although the design process now takes more time, this is overcompensated by the shortening of the downstream processes. They now run much faster because they benefit from the higher information content of the database."
What significance does "digitization" have for your areas and thus for your products?
"Digitization in opencast mining is omnipresent in both technology and design. More and more intelligent components are also finding their way into our and other products used in opencast mining. The current challenges are the security and networking of these components and the evaluation of the data we receive."
How do you respond to changes in customer requirements?
"As a company in direct contact with our customers, we learn their requirements directly from talking to them. If new requirements arise, we check directly whether and by what means we can incorporate them into our products."
What companies work with your machines?
They are international mining companies, such as:
