Working in the port machinery industry for more than 20 years, Liu always is the head of a port crane industry cabinet integrator, relying on the vigorous development of the industry, in recent years, the company’s business is thriving, there are three cabinet production bases in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, providing complete sets of electrical control system solutions for all kinds of cranes.

As the “center and brain” of supporting equipment, the characteristics of the control cabinet business continue to expand with the upgrade of end customer needs:
• Low level of product standardization
• High demand for customization
• Many specifications
• Small batch size

Therefore, for the engineering design team that undertakes the task of designing the drawing, the work pressure is increasing, and the resulting operational problems are also increasing. Liu’s understanding of “honest officials are difficult to judge housework” is also more and more profound.

Equipment integrators’ pain

— What guarantee do you take, my delivery date?

Business activities are the foundation of enterprise survival. As the “big parent” of the enterprise, in recent years, while constantly expanding the business, Liu is most troubled by the difficulty of ensuring delivery on time.

The business successfully won the bid, and the delivery date required by the customer was set there. As an important part of the control cabinet of the complete set of products, almost every batch can not avoid drawing changes based on various situations in the production process.

This was followed by a variety of complaints from the production workshop about schematic changes and the resulting impact on delivery. The headache for Liu is that whether the design team or the production team is struggling to deal with the delivery from beginning to end, the better the business, the lower the production efficiency, the more contradictions in team cooperation, and the more difficult the delivery guarantee.

The “Tao” of Siemens ICP

— Treat the symptoms and look at my “efficient design”

Siemens Control Cabinet Partner Program (referred to as Siemens ICP) is a new business of Siemens digital industry, refining many years of Siemens control cabinet business experience, the team of all control cabinet business “clinical” master. After understanding Mr. Liu’s confusion and desire, the Siemens ICP team proposed corresponding solutions for Mr. Liu.

ICP team expert Li Gong, relying on more than 20 years of Siemens control cabinet design experience and engineering team management experience, accurately locate the root of the “delivery guarantee” pain point – the lack of non-standard product design specifications. If the design is not standardized, the quality of schematic diagram is difficult to be guaranteed. The production link using the drawing needs to be transformed twice. When the problem is found, the engineer needs to provide on-site support and modify the schematic diagram, and the normal production rhythm is interrupted.

When there are many projects and the schedule is tight, the new project design and production site support further lengthen the design cycle, and the problem will continue to exist and even amplify, and the delivery time is more urgent. In this way, whether it is the production workshop or the engineer team, they are busy with various repair responses every day, and have no time to pay attention to improvement, and eventually fall into a vicious circle. Once this analysis came out, the production team and the engineer team nodded frequently.

The original core problem in the design, is that the design ability restricts the product quality and production efficiency, threatening the delivery time! Mr. Liu brightened up and expressed his hope to transplant Siemens’ design experience and processes to the company’s design team.

Li Gong gave the improvement plan of “efficient design” of Siemens ICP, and introduced to Liu and the design team the customized advanced application of many control cabinet designs, from sorting out the design process, clarifying the basic requirements of drawing, standardizating drawings and production documents, equipment naming and number rules, defining selection and symbol specifications, to building project structure, drawing structure, data storage specifications and so on.

In the three months after the full implementation of Siemens ICP enhancement program “Efficient design” program, Liu design team obtained a full set of “efficient design” output, and established their own port control cabinet design module, each module has a built-in design specification provided by “efficient design” to escort its drawing output. The drawings are guaranteed, the production process is smooth, and the delivery date is no longer difficult to general Liu’s enterprise.