Experience greater speed, precision and consistency, unlock your Hidden Factory.
Every factory in the United States has untapped production capacity. It’s the capacity that gets eaten up in downtime, inefficiencies, safety incidents, and unanticipated equipment failures. Tri Tech refers to this as the Hidden Factory®, which is the production potential already inside your facility waiting to be unlocked.
For plant engineers and operations leaders, unlocking the Hidden Factory® starts with smarter automation, with high-quality, high-precision control panels at the center of it all.
At Tri Tech Automation, the control panel design-build process is engineered to improve fabrication efficiency and accuracy, and accelerate speed to market, allowing your automation investment to deliver measurable operational gains faster.
A Confident, Seamless Control Panel Design-Build Process from Start to Finish
In traditional control panel design and fabrication, drawings are shared, marked up, revised, and can go through many iterations before a packet of paper hits the fabrication floor. This process is susceptible to version control issues, miscommunications, and component incompatibilities. Once in production, fabricators weed through drawings and material lists to prepare the project, which then follows a very linear process in which each portion of the build happens in sequential order. Speed and efficiency typically aren’t part of the discussion.
Tri Tech has developed a new process that is integrated and automated for a seamless, expedited customer experience:
- Up to 45% faster time to market
- Cloud capabilities for real-time collaboration
- Database-driven design to assure compatibility
- Digital twin to visualize your panel, verify accuracy, and ensure a perfect fit
- Quality control at every phase, including power-up
Database-Driven Control Panel Design Lays the Foundation
Database-driven design refers to a system that pulls from a standards database of the various components required for a control panel build. There are several time-saving advantages to using such a system, including:
- Automatic compatibility checks ensure everything designed into the panel will work together with no conflicts. This results in less rework, minimizes production delays, and helps to ensure there are no surprises when the control panel is installed in the field.
- Single source of truth in which schematics, terminal plans, wire lists and bills of materials are built from one dataset. If anything is updated, it flows through to all documentation associated with the job, ensuring accuracy of the design and build.
- Faster engineering design time significantly compresses the overall project timeline, shortening the path from concept to fabrication and directly impacting speed to market.
- Digital, structured documentation to the control panel fabrication floor ensure that wire lists are accurate, terminal assignments are precise, enclosure layouts are exact, and labels are consistent. This eliminates manual data entry, measurement errors, and transcription mistakes.
Speed, accuracy and time to market begin with this deliberate and automated control panel design process. Next stop is fabrication.
Control Panel Fabrication: A Parallel Production Process Shortens Turnaround Times
The database-driven design process sets each project up for success once it hits production. We’ve discussed the documentation that fabrication teams receive, which is digital, paperless, detailed, consistent and up to date. This in and of itself drives speed and precision. But we take that a step further with best-in-class equipment and skilled teams that prepare each component for production and ultimately, build it to exact specifications.
Material Prep
There are several components of the material prep phase for each control panel project. Tri Tech has fully automated the primary functions of the process: wiring and machine enclosure prep.
Wiring is one of the most labor-intensive aspects of control panel fabrication. It is also one of the most common sources of startup issues. Tri Tech integrates digital design data directly into our automated wire processing machine. This ensures correct wires are selected, cut to length, labeled and bundled for organized installation. This automation dramatically improves control panel fabrication efficiency by reducing human variability.
When it comes to panel enclosures, the traditional, non-automated approach involves cutting each portion of the panel manually. It relies on measurements being exact and cuts being clean. One mistake slows installation, creates waste, and results in rework. Tri Tech’s automated process runs directly from the digital engineering files created during the design phase to ensure exact cutouts and perfect component alignment, resulting in faster enclosure preparation.
A Closer Look at the Parallel Design Process
Following is a visual demonstration of all the steps required for control panel fabrication. In a traditional environment, each of these steps happen one-by-one, each step requiring completion of the one before for the project to progress. Tri Tech’s parallel design process allows many steps to happen all at once. Coupled with the speed and accuracy of the design process, this approach is what allows us to deliver up to 45% faster, with the highest level of quality.
Get Greater Value – Faster – From Your Automation Investment
Partnering with Tri Tech gives you an edge, helping you to reach your fullest potential in business, for your employees, and your communities. We are committed to supporting American manufacturers as you navigate pressures to reduce cost, be more productive, upgrade aging equipment and future-ready your organization through automation.
When control panels are designed and built with precision, automation systems perform as intended, and your plant gains capacity without expanding footprint or headcount. That’s how you unlock your Hidden Factory® faster, more efficiently, and with greater quality than ever before.
Want to get your automation solution quickly? Curious about what this process can do for you? Reach out to the Tri Tech team today to get started.
