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Ben George
Hi all,
Following applies to Eplan 5.70 NOT Eplan 21 (a totally different product aimed at the US market)
We've been using Autocad with extensive VBA for some years, recently we evaluated Eplan 5.7, Elecdes, PromisE and Autocad Electrical as replacements. Essentially in the Australian market place we have either Eplan or the ACAD plugin competitors available with local support.
A subsidiary firm of ours had been using Elecdes for some time, but were somewhat lost in maintaining the configuration as subsequent Autocad releases arose and were not using it for much more than simple Xrefing, as a result they recomended against continuing with it.
At the end of the evaluation period my department selected Eplan, at the same time a (distantly) related company in the same building selected Autocad Electrical for very similar work.
18 months later and they are now looking to switch.
Eplan has proved very simple to use once you get over its Germanic menu structures (its a bit like learning to program Siemens when you're used to Rockwell). At the end of a 3 day training course our department was producing drawings more accurately and quickly than after 3 years of Acad.
A key advantage it has is its speed, the thing would run on a 486 if it had to. Its backend model treats all drawings in a project as a single application, avoiding the Acad Electrical page/project loading issues. Page loads in eplan are effectively instantaneous.
This goes hand in hand with the excel generator plugin which allows you to generate sets of drawings from a spreadsheet. We find that engineers love making spreadsheets and compiling drawings from them is insanely quick - a 200 page drawing set can be generated in less than 90 seconds on an average cad workstation, although working off a network drive stretches this out to around 5~10 minutes. Finished project file sizes are also insanely small - this same project will end up as a 400k zip file of Eplan native file format.
Typically though you would just hit the print to pdf button (pdf publishing comes for free in Eplan) and email a pdf of the entire project, including parts lists xrefed to pages straight to the cabinet builder. This has been a lovely feature as we don't want to put Acrobat writer on peoples PCs.
A further advantage has been its _lack_ of code customisation, you can configure pretty much anything you want, but there's no easy to access the API - thus we've spent all our time configuring and been able to take advantage of every hotfix and service pack without any custom code compatability issues (I used to write reams of VBA for every version of Acad....). So far its been able to do everything we want without having to get to the backend programatically - unlike our related company who have been fighting ACAD all the way, they're now in touch with the US development team for some of their issues.
Its not all perfect though: the cabinet layout component is weak in the base model; the file structure it creates is archaic; there is a learning curve going from ACAD to Eplan as many things are quite different; the BOM import/export is very old fashioned using ascii control codes (although still easy to use I must admit); and out of the box its preconfigured for IEC style drawings with DIN style device references (the device referencing is _awesome_ by the way if you use IEC 61346 style tagging).
For us here in Australia that's fine, for most of Asia its fine, anyone in Europe its perfect - but for the US market its best to get your Eplan rep to set up a JIC based build with ladder style page set ups for you as part of the conditions of sale.
Cheers,
Ben
Following applies to Eplan 5.70 NOT Eplan 21 (a totally different product aimed at the US market)
We've been using Autocad with extensive VBA for some years, recently we evaluated Eplan 5.7, Elecdes, PromisE and Autocad Electrical as replacements. Essentially in the Australian market place we have either Eplan or the ACAD plugin competitors available with local support.
A subsidiary firm of ours had been using Elecdes for some time, but were somewhat lost in maintaining the configuration as subsequent Autocad releases arose and were not using it for much more than simple Xrefing, as a result they recomended against continuing with it.
At the end of the evaluation period my department selected Eplan, at the same time a (distantly) related company in the same building selected Autocad Electrical for very similar work.
18 months later and they are now looking to switch.
Eplan has proved very simple to use once you get over its Germanic menu structures (its a bit like learning to program Siemens when you're used to Rockwell). At the end of a 3 day training course our department was producing drawings more accurately and quickly than after 3 years of Acad.
A key advantage it has is its speed, the thing would run on a 486 if it had to. Its backend model treats all drawings in a project as a single application, avoiding the Acad Electrical page/project loading issues. Page loads in eplan are effectively instantaneous.
This goes hand in hand with the excel generator plugin which allows you to generate sets of drawings from a spreadsheet. We find that engineers love making spreadsheets and compiling drawings from them is insanely quick - a 200 page drawing set can be generated in less than 90 seconds on an average cad workstation, although working off a network drive stretches this out to around 5~10 minutes. Finished project file sizes are also insanely small - this same project will end up as a 400k zip file of Eplan native file format.
Typically though you would just hit the print to pdf button (pdf publishing comes for free in Eplan) and email a pdf of the entire project, including parts lists xrefed to pages straight to the cabinet builder. This has been a lovely feature as we don't want to put Acrobat writer on peoples PCs.
A further advantage has been its _lack_ of code customisation, you can configure pretty much anything you want, but there's no easy to access the API - thus we've spent all our time configuring and been able to take advantage of every hotfix and service pack without any custom code compatability issues (I used to write reams of VBA for every version of Acad....). So far its been able to do everything we want without having to get to the backend programatically - unlike our related company who have been fighting ACAD all the way, they're now in touch with the US development team for some of their issues.
Its not all perfect though: the cabinet layout component is weak in the base model; the file structure it creates is archaic; there is a learning curve going from ACAD to Eplan as many things are quite different; the BOM import/export is very old fashioned using ascii control codes (although still easy to use I must admit); and out of the box its preconfigured for IEC style drawings with DIN style device references (the device referencing is _awesome_ by the way if you use IEC 61346 style tagging).
For us here in Australia that's fine, for most of Asia its fine, anyone in Europe its perfect - but for the US market its best to get your Eplan rep to set up a JIC based build with ladder style page set ups for you as part of the conditions of sale.
Cheers,
Ben
