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EPLAN - efficient engineering.
Efficiency through all stages of the process
Rittmeyer designs a large hydroelectric power station project using Eplan Electric p8
Rittmeyer AG is the first company you should turn to for automation, instrumentation and
control systems for hydroelectric power installations. One of the largest projects that the
specialist based in Baar, in the Swiss canton of Zug, has ever handled is the equipment of
the Kraftwerkverbund Hinterrhein with modern and consistent instrumentation and control
systems. Rittmeyer‘s engineers handle the complex diagrams and control cabinet designs
with the Electric P8 E-CAD solution by EPLAN.
The company has grown on the strength of its metering technology, drawing on one
hundred years of tradition and experience. Rittmeyer specializes in industry-specific
solutions in instrumentation and control for water supply, waste water and environmental
technology and hydroelectric generation. The company, which has become part of the
Brugg Group, has 330 employees working in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, France
and Croatia; two thirds of whom work at the headquarters in Baar. Rittmeyer‘s reputation
as a partner for economical, efficient and reliable solutions is based not least on its own
development of instrumentation and control technology such as the RIFLEX automation
and remote control system and the RITOP process control system, which it deploys in
these industries.
Unhurried and on time – even in the most complex projects
Large-scale projects such as this Hinterrhein project are not
a day-to-day challenge, even for the experienced specialists
working for Rittmeyer. The project was set up to connect
four locations, each with a number of turbines, the Thusis
power station and the three control centres at Bärenburg,
Ferrera and Sils with four redundant server systems to
create a distributed server system. The power station union
comprises a total of twenty production units consisting
of turbines, generators, auxiliary and control systems. An
average of ten control cabinets with various systems had
to be designed and built for each unit. A lot of work for the
team was headed by Martin Wolf, Head of project engi-
neering in the hydroelectric power stations division: The
drawing sets for the various units are up to 700 pages long,
containing all the details right down to single-pole dia-
grams. Thirty sets of drawings of various sizes have been
finished so far, about a third of the total requirement; the
first 50 of a total of about 200 control cabinets have also
already been designed and built.
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“Thanks to EPLAN we are very relaxed about this project
and are well within our deadline,” confirmed Martin Wolf –
not a matter of course in an industry that operates under
enormous cost and time pressures. His engineers have
been working with EPLAN Electric P8 for a good year now;
“a quantum leap by comparison with the previous tool,”
says the engineer who, as the project manager, was also
responsible for its introduction in the company. Migration to
a modern ECAD tool had been on the agenda at Rittmeyer
for some time; the fact that the decision for EPLAN Electric
P8 was finally taken at the end of 2010 was not only a
consequence of the EPLAN platform‘s wide penetration in
the industry and the experiences of Austrian and German
colleagues in the company; but also because the company
had won the Hinterrhein project, which would demand
maximum output in diagram drawing.
On time, flexible and consistent
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avoiding handover losses and duplicated work
Rittmeyer has 35 engineers working in the Hydroelectric
power station division – in electrical engineering and
hardware design, and also in servicing and maintenance
directly at the customer‘s site. Thanks to the thorough
and intensive support offered by EPLAN, the basic
roll-out of the customized new ECAD platform went
without a hitch in all areas; “in a very short space of time,
after three to four months, we were operational and fully
ready for action for engineering with EPLAN Electric
P8”, confirms Martin Wolf. For the departmental head,
flexibility and consistency are the decisive requirements
for a modern electrical engineering tool: the things that
count are minimizing handover losses at the interfaces
in the working process and the avoidance of duplicated
work, superfluous and redundant activity; our labour
hours are expensive and must, therefore, be deployed as
effectively as possible for us to remain competitive.
Data consistency creates efficiency
Efficient working thanks to consistent data management
and standard processing through all the stages in the
process, from preliminary planning to documentation and
handover is thus a decisive strength in the deployment of
EPLAN Electric P8 as far as Martin Wolf is concerned: the
set of diagrams prepared by the hardware engineers is
passed to production preparation who, use the parts lists
generated automatically by EPLAN – “we never had this
before to this quality” –, they can determine immediately,
without having to do time-consuming manual searches,
what is available from the stores, and what needs to be
ordered. In principle, it is also possible with EPLAN to have
the materials ordering run fully automatically; the Workflow
optimization project is still running as we speak “there is
tremendous potential here, there is still more for us to find”.
Production itself works with the PDF printouts of the lists
and circuit drawings prepared from EPLAN which it can
draw down directly from the network. “Paper drawings are
used only to make amendments and to check off the steps
that have been completed”, says Martin Wolf describing
further progress in the process. This would be used by
quality inspection; it is, however, conceivable that in future
this step, too, will also be run paper-free on the screen.
Water & Waste water
Intensive support and high quality
Fault-free automatic generation
Scheduling, circuit diagrams and cabling plans can be generated automatically through EPLAN – an important plus point
for Martin Wolf: this does not only increase the speed of the process, but also enhances quality, as transmission errors are
prevented. Cross-references and allocation lists work “one hundred percent”, confirmed the Project manager. Further benefit:
Signal outputs and interfaces to the software can also be created automatically – Rittmeyer needs just this flexibility: “We
buy in controller hardware and program it with our own software solutions, and the automatic generation of the interfaces is
a great help in ensuring error-free configuration of the interfaces” explains Martin Wolf. To do this, P8 accesses a signal list
in Excel developed in conjunction with EPLAN; “all we had to do to set this up was to adapt to our needs a basic module for
data import and export that was already present on the EPLAN platform”. The one-hundred percent data consistency of the
EPLAN platform is an invaluable benefit in particular for a company like Rittmeyer which has numerous different component
suppliers, but as the integrator and single point of contact for the customer it is responsible for the punctual commissioning
and smooth running of the project: each component needs to be only created once in the system; although initially there
is more work, the component data is available to be reused in all tasks without having to be created again. Martin Wolf is
therefore particularly taken by this device concept: “We can download component data directly from the EPLAN Data Portal
into our EPLAN databases and need only adapt it slightly for our own graphical representation; this is a very powerful function
that I do not see in other systems.”
“Relying on the right tool”
The effort of creating the component libraries is especially worthwhile for a company that has a particular range of resources:
“Twenty people work with EPLAN over all three business divisions; it‘s well worth it for large departments such as ours”, says
Martin Wolf. P8 is now fully up and running at Rittmeyer and it is the principal tool in electrical engineering; the old system
will be used only to finish off old projects or to make minor amendments to old projects. Although other tools are also used
alongside it, as the customers have previously specified what ECAD tool was to be used when awarding the project, it has
become the tool of choice in the power station sector in particular, says Martin Wolf. Where the designers are free to make
the decision, EPLAN always comes first as the best, most efficient and most comprehensive system: “EPLAN Electric P8 has
meant a huge leap forward for us; we are certain we have put our faith in the right tool”.
Go to www.rittmeyer.com to find more about Rittmeyer.
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The first choice
EPLAN Software & Service GmbH & Co. KG
An der alten Ziegelei 2 · DE - 40789 Monheim am Rhein
Tel +49 (0)2173 3964-0 · Fax +49 (0)2173 3964-25
E-Mail: [email protected] · www.eplan.de
EPLAN Software & Service AG
Grossmattstrasse 9 · CH-8902 Urdorf
Tel +41 44 870 99 00 · Fax + 41 44 870 99 09
E-Mail: [email protected] · www.eplan.ch