CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
11 September 2008
Implementation Investments
Zuken Heads Full Steam towards Becoming a Leader in the Rail Vehicle Sector Thanks to E³.series
Increasing numbers of rail vehicle manufacturers are using E³.series for the electrical design of their products. Alstom LHB Salzgitter will be supplying the first rail car platform designed with E³.series before the year is out. This underlines Zuken's strategy of growth in the rail vehicle market, adding to the company's growing market share at a local and international level. In its work with manufacturers of rail vehicles, Zuken considers itself a provider of solutions for electronics and electrical engineering, with its eye keenly on the position of market leader. Global companies like Alstom, Bombardier Transportation, Voith Turbo and others are now relying on the E³.series software suite for electrical design. This year, the company's stand atInnoTrans in Berlin is demonstrating the gains in productivity that can be achieved with E³.series.
"E³.series was the first piece of E-CAE software to be developed from scratch for use on Windows systems. Another of the strengths of E³.series is the huge number of ways in which it can be integrated with existing IT infrastructures and how it exchanges data with other software solutions. The graphical user interface is intuitive and enables new users to become productive in a very short time. And this is the feature that has won over the rail vehicle manufacturers," explains Joachim Frank, Director of E³.business.
Alstom opts for configurators
By working with E³.series, Alstom is now able to use a configurator. In the past whenever a new order arrived in the electrical department, the first job was to look for similar past projects and to use the one most appropriate as a basis for the new order. All parameters, including the follow-up parameters, then had to be adjusted by hand. Calculating the follow-up parameters in particular was not only time-consuming but also prone to error due to the manual changes needed.
Using configurators offers a more effective approach and one which is less prone to error: "To start with, we produced a master plan, containing all the options for the Coradia Continental vehicle platform. The customer now specifies which of the options he wants. For example, if he needs an electric multiple unit with a total of seven wagons and a maximum speed of 120 km/h, we simply enter the main parameters from the customer's requests into the configurator. Most of the follow-up parameters are then calculated automatically by control equipment stored in the configurator," says Mr Fricke, group leader for circuit diagrams, commenting on how the configurator works.
Using E³.series functionalities in combination with a configurator is just one of the ways in which this E-CAE solution can be used. You can find more information about E³.series at http://www.zuken.com/e3
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