Hagerman Blog

If you have drawn schematics in AutoCAD, you know that one of the most time-consuming tasks is adding wire ties and skips. I'm using the schematic below to illustrate the difference.

One of the most boring topics for most designers and engineering are labels. Most specifically, wire and terminal labels. As you design a piece of equipment, each wire gets a label. The problem is that someone has to create the physical tag for each wire end. It may sound like an easy task to accomplish, but imagine that a 5-page schematic package might contain over 150 wire numbers. So how do we get those labels to the electricians? In the old days, we would print out the schematics and use a yellow highlighter to mark the wire label as you typed it into a Brady label maker. Doing this could take hours, and it was easy to miss some, resulting in electricians and assemblers stopping their work to make another label.

Most of us in the manufacturing sector understand the need to manage engineering and design data, and Vault is a great solution for that. It is perfect for keeping file references, revision and version management and alleviates the “last one in wins” issue. However, Vault doesn’t assist with challenges like bulk loading data with rules, exporting various files to downstream users and connecting to other business systems such as ERP.