Acting globally, engineering individually

Wherever explosive goods require a safe framework, the products of globally active R. STAHL AG, based in Waldenburg, Germany, are not far away. The technology company is committed to customized explosion protection and plant safety – with broad expertise in automation engineering as well as in the area of switching devices and lights for potentially explosive atmospheres. Consulting, planning, engineering and training complete the offer. R. STAHL implements thousands of projects every year. The company now relies entirely on AUCOTEC's Engineering Base (EB) for the development of new products and solutions.

'As the degree of customization, complexity and documentation requirements are increasing, the lot size is decreasing. In addition, customer requirements often change late in the production process', explained Thomas Merkel, Head of IT at R. STAHL. Thus, maximum flexibility is required for the process from tender to production; at the same time, the workflow must remain automated and always provide consistent, up-to-date data to those involved in sales, engineering and production.

'Due to these challenges and our digitalization strategy, we have opted for the integrative platform Engineering Base, which extends into our ERP system and production and provides machines and production employees with real-time data from the engineering process', said Merkel. The previous solution environment with several engineering systems is consolidated with EB and thus standardizes the processes. 'This ensures greater efficiency in our global internal processes and in the processing of customer-specific issues', he added.

EB's modern, web-service-oriented architecture allows R. STAHL's engineering to always provide the latest data online to employees and machines in production. 'In addition, EB tools such as the Advanced Typical Manager or the Workflow Assistant help us to map our processes more efficiently, more transparently, and without tool changes', said the Head of IT.

R. STAHL has been working with AUCOTEC software for over 20 years. In the first phase, the tried-and-tested classic ELCAD was initially replaced by EB for simpler products in large quantities. 'With our decision to use EB in all areas of engineering, we can now also develop complex products quickly and efficiently', said Thomas Merkel. R. STAHL has been able to integrate development and production even more closely as part of the global rollout of EB.