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.

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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

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Tel +49 (0)2173 3964-0 · Fax +49 (0)2173 3964-25

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EPLAN Software & Service AG

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E-Mail: info@eplan.ch · www.eplan.ch