Most approaches to electrical design and engineering habitually miss critical opportunities to improve efficiency. Electrical design and engineering costs much more in time, effort, rework and money than it should. Integration, in all its forms, is a huge stumbling block. For example, the design process makes no realistic provision for different groups of engineers at different locations to take responsibility for different parts of the design and then integrate their changes back into the main project. Attempting to manage this process manually produces a myriad of changes that then have to be collated, one by one, and factored back into the project. Consider also the datasheet problem. In an electrical design environment, datasheets contain vital information about all the electrical engineering data relating to particular components. This information serves the engineer seeking technical reference information, the designer specifying purchase requirements to a supplier, and the supplier seeking to fulfil the supply or communicate alternatives. Yet precious hours and dollars are wasted in shipyards every day because there is no easy way of creating one reliable and integrated source for this critical and widely used data. Consequently, changes that have been made to the datasheet content, which can have very significant engineering consequences, cannot be highlighted or tracked in any way. Incredibly, reproducing the content of one datasheet template for multiple identical items remains a manual, iterative process! In this paper, AVEVA contends that a radical rethink of electrical design and engineering processes, and the technology that serves them, is necessary. Integration is the absolute prerequisite for efficiency.
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