Full Speed Ahead

Starting in 2016, nothing at Lenze would ever be the same again, at least with an eye to the future: “Management gave us the mandate to make the front end of the business more competitive,” says Lenze Senior Vice President for Process and Quality Management Gerd Schüler. Optimising the front end specifically meant that potential customers should be able to effortlessly integrate Lenze products and digital services into their workflows. The special challenge here was that some “old” products, with their associated master data and documentation, weren’t suitable for digitalisation. Schüler: “It was immediately clear that we’d have to forge new paths that would call everything into question.” And, in fact, they did just that – not by exceeding existing technological limitations, but by completely blowing through them. Lenze went so far as to develop new products that could be digitalised and simply created new master data.

After five years of “new construction,” the interim results are impressive. Instead of server-based, on-premises solutions with limited storage and computing power, everything now runs in the cloud. Instead of static product data management with the continual creation of new data records and maintenance of countless variants, Lenze now relies on selected information units with stored rule sets. Instead of becoming increasingly dependent on proprietary platform solutions from individual software providers, Lenze now utilises various target systems as desired and necessary. Information is now intelligently coordinated and synthesised. Today, Lenze offers its customers a veritable extra added value in the form of complete EPLAN data sets that can be generated in seconds. And where company processes and information used to stop at the company’s internal firewall for security purposes, Lenze is now networking with the rest of the world.

“The machine does the rest”

Schüler explains the concept behind the EPF: “If you partition things in a sensible way, make them small and manage them differently, then you become quick. Then I have my ‘building blocks’ and can reassemble information quickly to serve a wide variety of target systems. If we combine this with rule sets and match it with variant configurations, information can be compiled in seconds when the customer decides what they want. The machine does the rest.” It does it faster by many orders of magnitude. Previously, the effort required to generate a data set took an average of two hours. Now it needs just seconds without any human intervention. To date, Lenze has invoiced 200,000 material numbers from a solution space of 10³² technically buildable data sets. “10³² means that there are more possibilities to individually design Lenze products than there are stars in the Milky Way,” Schüler says. “In principle, it approaches infinity. That’s why it made less sense for us as a variant manufacturer to store everything in the EPLAN Data Portal than it does for a volume manufacturer.”

Spiegel adds: “Previously, the data for EPLAN was always created manually. That may have been a good idea for low-variance inverters, controllers and accessories. However, we couldn’t adequately represent a product like the i550 with its many variants since the effort required for maintaining 2,000 to 3,000 variants would be too cumbersome and it would have become too confusing if we had listed all of them in the EPLAN Data Portal.” In the past, the companies made a compromise: Lenze only created data for the individual components of the i550, from which customers had to assemble the device themselves in EPLAN. Spiegel: “Problems regularly cropped up because customers only knew the designation for the complete inverter and couldn’t deduce the components from it.” The market definitely approves of the new ease of use of the Easy Product Finder with its features for generating and downloading the complete EPLAN data package (edz file) for each product variant – as evidenced by the steadily increasing numbers of clicks, which, according to Schüler, “correlate with rising sales.”

The physical product is one thing. Providing information appropriate to each variant is something else – which Schüler considers to be a basic requirement for customers. And he believes that if it’s a basic service, it should be provided. The EPLAN data sets must be available for engineering when or before the products are sold; it’s mandatory. “Not doing this means drowning in costs or slipping down to the level of a niche supplier. The fact is that data is used and combined to derive better decisions in terms of lower life-cycle costs. This requires the exact description of the asset. EPLAN is the best environment for this because the schematics depict every relationship amongst all the assets in a machine.”

Schüler continues: “We work with quite a few leading machine builders. They simulate the commissioning, operations, optimisation and maintenance of a machine at a point in time before it physically exists.” One of the things required for this is digital depictions for various engineering environments. What sets a company apart on the market are the accompanying services that accelerate workflows, including intelligent information and the ability to exchange it globally via standard interfaces. These are now almost even more important than the product itself, which is becoming increasingly interchangeable.