9 Support for international and national standards as well
as local manufacturing rules.
Cable Design
Introduction
There are two people that are very important to your company,
your customer, and your share holder. Both are very
demanding, a customer can easily swap to another supplier if
they are not getting a satisfactory service and a share holder
can easily sell their shares if they are not profitable.
CableBuilder allows you to keep your customer and share
holders happy, by enabling your company to provide world
class service at a low cost that would attract more customer
orders. This will reduce the cost of running the company, hence
making it more profitable.
CableBuilder shortens the quotation cycle, reduces waste,
reduces the time to perform bulk updates, scrap and rework,
and reduces the cost of quality. CableBuilder helps your
engineers design a cable quickly; it is then able to automatically
generate accurate costs, accurate manufacturing instructions,
datasheets and catalogues, bill-of-materials and routing. It
keeps track of engineering changes and integrates to ERP
systems such as SAP, Baan, InnoVites and many others.
CableBuilder is used by both small and multi-national
manufacturers alike, to produce and maintain a wide varirty of
cable designs. These include power Cables (LV, MV, HV,
Overhead), instrumentation and control, telephone, LAN, fibre
optics, and bespoke composite cables.
Accurate cable designs
Cable design is the heart of all your company processes. This
means accurate designs can produce accurate costs, accurate
datasheets and most importantly, quality products that
accurately reflect the customers needs, and comply to
ternational or international standards.
Similarly, the design module is at the heart of CableBuilder.
The design module has many features that help the engineers
design accurate designs quickly. They are listed here;
Copyright 2011 Cimteq Ltd. All rights reserved.
9 Support for every cable construction or type
9 Version control to keep you in control of design quality
and provide traceability
9 Datasheet generation in multiple formats including PDF,
RTF, HTML and Microsoft Excel
9 Generation of products catalogues for your website
9 Automatic generation of design codes based on design
attributes and customisable to local rules
9 Online customisable costing with unlimited cost types
9 Automatic and interactive cable layup and calculation of
minimum diameter over layed up cores.
9 Side-by-side design comparison between a number of
designs or versions of the same design
9 Generation of manufacturing instructions
9 A document repository to help keep track of all
communications with the customer
9 Mass selectable data extractions to Microsoft Excel
9 Powerful search engine to help your designers and sales
people find designs quickly hence avoiding redesigning
an existing product.
9 Secure data; CableBuilder security is structured in such a
way as to allow access to only those who need access to
a particular design data.
Visualisation
Visualising a cable design is an important communication aid to
convey messages to customers and to the shop floor. Product
visualisation can enhance the professionalism of datasheets
and catalogues. CableBuilder is capable of generating cross
section drawings, cable profile drawings and 3D models.
Fig 1 - Interactive 3D model (use your mouse to examine
the cable in Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 or above)
Process design
Design accuracy also means the accuracy of the specification
of the manufacturing process. This means, the selection of the
correct machine and the calculation of correct setup and
processing times. These parameters are of paramount
importance to the calculation of the product cost. Such
information is also vital to scheduling manufacturing and raw
material ordering and giving the customer accurate lead-times.
CableBuilder provides many facilities to support the
manufacturing process specification that include;
9 Automatic machine selection based on the manufacturers
own rules and the capability of their machines
9 Alternative machine specification allowing per-machine
cost comparisons
9 Specification of the setup of the machine, such as the
specification of dies for wire drawing, or the temperatures
for each zone on an extrusion line.
9 Customisable attributes and calculation rules
Mass updates
A well run cable making company is a dynamic company.
Processes are continuously changing due to improvement
projects, or due to material changes, or due to specification
changes. There are two traditional methods of handling these
changes. The first is to ignore them when they occur and only
revise cable designs when they are needed. The second is to
mass update every design affected.
It is obvious that the first method of managing engineering
changes has many pitfalls resulting in scrap and unnecessary
redesign.
However, mass updating every design whenever a change
occurs is very time consuming. On average, it accounts for 6
to 8 man months of engineering time per year.
Using CableBuilder to mass update designs will reduce the
engineering time consumption of mass changes to a few
weeks, or even few days per year, along with reduced
opportunity for human errors. This means huge saving in
engineering effort and reduction of the risk of using out of date
specifications.
Here are some examples of how CableBuilder can help you
deal with changes;
9 Mass update on selective groups of designs
9 Changes through the Export and Import of groups of
design to and from Microsoft Excel
9 Swapping of raw materials, machines, and workcentres
9 Mass attribute changes for any design layer or
manufacturing process
9 Mass transfer to ERP systems at the touch of a button.
Flexibility
Every manufacturing environment is different. What makes a
company unique is its innovation, its people, its working
practises and its attitude to continuous improvement. A good
software application should be designed to leverage these
differences to the benefit of the company and to encourage
innovation and continuous development. It is not often you find
a company with such enlightened approach to software. But
Cimteq is such a company. CableBuilder is an extremely
Copyright 2011 Cimteq Ltd. All rights reserved.
flexible system that can easily adapt to its environment. Its
flexibility is apparent in the rich features as described here;
9 Configurable attributes that describe the design, its layers
and the manufacturing processes
9 Flexible rules and look up tables applied by product group
or generally to all products
9 User defined process specifications with user defined
attributes and user defined rules
Professional output
Flexibility extends also to the formatting of the output from
CableBuilder. All reports and datasheets are completely
configurable by the user and are multi lingual. At the heart of
CableBuilder resides a seamlessly integrated reporting
toolcalled Crystal Reports from SAP. Crystal reports is an easy
to use tool, with simple, intuitive drag-and-drop application and
is also the world's best of class in report generation.
Integration
CableBuilder will integrate to your ERP system, or it can form
the base for your next ERP system implementation. The cost
savings of integrating CableBuilder with ERP are immense.
A cable maker would normally employ a person responsible for
data entry of design data into their ERP system. This is not
only very costly, but would also introduce human errors that
lead to scrap and rework.
CableBuilder is an XML based application with an open
database that can very easily be integrated to any other
system. CableBuilder is currently integrated to a number of
ERP software systems such as SAP, and to other application
like Microsoft Office and MES (Manufacturing Execution
Systems), and more.
What next?
Dont take our word for it here is what Draka Norsk Kabel say
about CableBuilder;
"CableBuilder enables us at Draka to streamline our design and
product engineering processes to become more responsive to
customer needs."
Let us show you how CableBuilder can help you get the best
out of your business. Contact us for a demonstration.
Cimteq Ltd.
Tel: +44 1978 664 215 Fax: +44 1978 667 005
web: www.cimteq.com email: info@cimteq.com