Streamlining Building Automation: How WSCAD's Electrical CAD Software Revolutionises Building Automation Design and Tendering

With over 25 years of experience, GA Pro Engineering specialises in designing building and room automation, security, media, data technology, programming and electrical installation. Based in Munich, Germany, the company provides these 

services for the construction of large office buildings, with past customers including international IT companies and leading automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Porsche, BMW and Audi. 

 

GA Pro Engineering not only uses WSCAD’s building automation solution as a configuration tool for creating schematics, but also to provide clearly specified tender documents for awarding projects to subcontractors. Backed by 30 years of experience in electrical CAD solutions and continual updates, there is nothing that compares to WSCAD’s software for building automation planners.

 

 

WSCAD software usually starts with the design and graphical representation of plant layouts and control diagrams, which GA Pro Engineering receives as P&IDs from technical building equipment (TBE) design bureaus. These will offer guidance on design for sanitary equipment, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, water, energy demand, building automation, security and data technology. From that point onwards, it’s up to GA Pro Engineering to carry out the detailed hardware and software design required for building and room automation.

 

A critical aspect of this is incorporating automation stations and systems, field devices, such as fire protection and smoke extraction systems, valves, actuators, sensors and meters that may be required. If the automation scheme for a ventilation system has been designed, then all associated objects or data points are defined, recorded and assigned properties in the WSCAD software. The recording of all objects and the data points means that they can be easily replicated and re-used. The data points are then available without System discontinuity through our disciplines up to our electrical schematics, which reach the connection points of the PLC controllers and their programming. The innate scalability of the software also allows for projects of increased complexity to be accommodated.

 

 

Regulatory compliance symbols are also included in the automation scheme with reference to specific manufacturer’s products and associated part data – a feature that is highly advantageous when specifying order requirements in tender documents. All this is taken directly from supplied information or from the free online components database offered by WSCAD, wscaduniverse.com. Detail is matched with intuitive functionality. Parts can be swapped out quickly, for example, changing the manufacturer for 120 sensors takes just a few clicks. 

 

The structured identification of schematics to regulatory standards by WSCAD enables the reuse of designs across buildings. A ventilation system from one office schematic can be dragged and dropped to another while automatically transferring identifiers and information. As a result, any time-consuming or error-prone manual renaming is eliminated. Projects can also be structured and identified in accordance with multiple standards. A recent GA Pro Engineering project involved using AMEV and ISO IEC EN 81346 simultaneously, incorporating two identification systems in one planning process – a unique advantage of WSCAD ELECTRIX compared to other solutions.

 

 

As well as supporting the building automation designer, WSCAD assists other contractors involved in a project too. The automation schematics with data points and functional descriptions translate directly into a bill of materials for documentation, streamlining the tendering process. Numerous interfaces in the software enable the easy import or export of data from WSCAD, if they happen to use a different platform, allowing them to seamlessly transfer data. When complete, schematics can be imported directly into the electrical installation plan, including all specifications, locations and mounting positions.

 

Due to its flexibility and wide range of options, WSCAD provides more creative freedom for GA Pro Engineering’s projects. Features such as recording, product information, automation of recurring processes, structured identifications and easy data transfer not only benefit designers, but also cabinet engineers and electricians at the construction site or facility managers at the building. This ensures that data for building automation systems can be used continuously throughout the design and life cycle of an office. Rather than just expediting design and tendering, WSCAD’s ELECTRIX provides additional benefits across the entire construction process.

 

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About WSCAD

WSCAD is part of the Buhl Group, which has 700 employees and has been specializing in the development of Electrical-CAD solutions for over three decades. Customers include medium-sized companies, international corporations, and planning and engineering offices. More than 35,000 users from the machine and plant construction sectors, as well as from building automation and installation technology, work with the integrative WSCAD software. On a platform with a central database, it combines the six disciplines of electrical engineering, switch cabinet construction, process and fluid engineering, building automation, and electrical installation. A component exchange is immediately completed in the plans of all disciplines. Mechanisms for standardizing, reusing, and automating processes in electrical design and building automation shorten the planning and construction times from several weeks to just a few hours or minutes, with higher quality work results. Maintenance personnel and service technicians use the WSCAD Cabinet AR App to scan field devices and components in the control cabinet using a smartphone or tablet, and have immediate access to current electrical plans, including BMK, item data, and the original data sheets from the manufacturers.

Users can find over 1.4 million item data from more than 380 manufacturers in the WSCAD-, EDZ-, DWG- and 3D-STEP format in the world’s most powerful Electrical-CAD data library wscaduniverse.com. Use is free of charge, as is the posting of product data by the manufacturers. Eleven seamlessly interlocking services from WSCAD Global Business Services round off the range of services: these include engineering and migration check-ups, workflow and processes, consulting and training, or digitizing paper documents and converting different Electrical-CAD formats.

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