Electric.ie July/ August 2020

56 ELECTRIC.IE • The Magazine & Website for the Irish Electrical Industry • Rittal Wiring Processing – Overnight W alk into Ripploh’s large and tidy workshop, and you will see numerous enclosures and mounting plates waiting to be processed. While a few staff members are busy with the assemblage and wiring, one thing is notable by its absence. There is no paperwork anywhere – no folders with schematic diagrams or GA drawings. In the 22 years since it was founded, the company has grown from being a small contract manufacturer with four employees to a manufacturer of panel building and switchgear manufacturing and engineering. “Today, we have numerous customers, for example from the mechanical engineering sector, who concentrate on the design of their machinery and merely specify the type of components and IOs they use,” reports Andreas Ripploh, Owner and Managing Director of Ripploh Elektrotechnik & Engineering. “We then plan the entire control and switchgear system right from the start and manufacture it in our own workshop.” Taking a Customer Order Every stage at Ripploh is highly automated. The process of ordering, for example, is deemed to be a ‘pre-engineering’ step. Customers are provided with a “UNIT-E” ([ www.unit-e.de ]www. unit-e.de ) enclosure configurator for pre-conceived and configurable assemblies. This gives them a quote based on the information they provide. The Eplan Engineering Centre (EEC) is the next step, where detailed planning begins, following a design check. Less than 24 hours after receiving the order, customers receive a finished circuit diagram containing ‒ Automation is a hot topic currently in panel building and switchgear manufacturing. Ripploh Elektrotechnik und Engineering is one example of a German company whose experience with automation epitomises just what is possible, notably with wiring and robot-assisted wiring. all the information they need. “Our ERP system is closely linked to Eplan,” Mr. Ripploh explains: “We maintain all the component data in our ERP system’s database and then write it directly into the Eplan database.” The quality of the data and the presence of a data format with a uniform standard represents one of the most important challenges for engineers as Mr Ripploh describes: “Clean datasets are more important in panel building and switchgear manufacturing than many people think." Wiring is 4 x faster T he data generated in engineering is used to control the workshop processes. The 3D planning in Eplan Pro Panel provides the data for the CNC machine to machine panels and to provide fully automatic wiring processing. The wires are cut to length, stripped, crimped and labelled using the Wire Terminal from Rittal Automation Systems. The machine can assemble up to 1,500 wires during an eight-hour shift, and, since no operator intervention is required once an order has been started, the Wire Terminal can repeat this volume output again overnight. Staff remove the wires from the machine in the morning and commence wiring straight away. This alone has quadrupled the company’s productivity around wire processing and eliminated the need to always have an operator present to run the machine. Workflows Precisely Regulated The Wire Terminal machine has another important advantage in that the sequence in which the wires are processed and placed on the rails can now be specified. This is important in terms of efficiency. If, for example, a small series of ten enclosures is due to be wired, then a sequence can be selected on the Wire Terminal machine so that the staff The Wire Terminal from Rittal Automation Systems can assemble up to 1,500 wires during an eight-hour shift.