EPLAN Electric P8
The ECAD Standard for Your Engineering – More Than Just Electrical Schematic Drawings

EPLAN Electric P8

The ECAD Standard for Your Engineering – More Than Just Electrical Schematic Drawings

EPLAN Electric P8 is a consistent, integrated and fast engineering system for you to plan and design the electrical engineering for machines and plant systems. The software supports 2D computer-aided engineering and a wide variety of engineering methods: from manual creation to standardized and template-based approaches. The project data, once entered into the schematic, becomes the foundation for the automated completion of machine and plant system documentation. In short, EPLAN Electric P8 electrical design software offers you much more than “just” drawing schematics and circuit diagrams.

Disciplines and industries

EPLAN Electric P8 for Your Areas of Application

Discover EPLAN Electric P8’s many varied application fields – including for your industry and engineering disciplines.

Automation Technology

Thanks to macro technology, EPLAN Electric P8 provides a foundation for standardizing and further automating your processes.

Electrical Engineering

Planning electrical engineering is a complex field of topics, particularly as several people are often working in various disciplines on the same project. Electrical engineering data must also be usable for other departments. At the same time, electrical engineering is always under time pressures, must deliver on time and always keep an eye on incurred costs. EPLAN offers you an integrated software solution for efficient electrical engineering.

Service and Maintenance

Success for industrial companies is strongly related to their work in maintenance and servicing, which prevents machine and system failures and enables the best possible utilization and availability of plant systems over their entire service life. EPLAN offers you integrated solutions for digitalizing your processes.

Building Automation

To ensure cost-effective engineering processes, architects, engineers, planning offices and construction companies need a transparent foundation of information and efficient digital tools. EPLAN solutions make it possible for you to work in an interdisciplinary way with integrated data for building automation.

Configuration

The term automated engineering combines configuration with engineering. In practice, this means automating engineering processes, integrating these processes and connecting them with configuration processes in sales, order processing and directly to engineering. EPLAN offers you solutions for implementing automated engineering in your company.

Machinery and Plant Construction

The daily ordering business is getting much faster and time pressures are rising, no least due to international competitors. At the same time, customers are demanding increasingly more individualized projects through to mass customization. EPLAN is here supporting you with integrated engineering solutions along your value chain.

Panel Building

You can optimize and industrialize your processes in control and switchgear system engineering using EPLAN’s engineering solutions in conjunction with Rittal’s system and automation expertise. Consistent data is the key to success here. We support you in saving both time and money, in avoiding errors and in increasing your productivity over the long term.

Automotive

Hardly any other industry is facing such enormous upheavals as the automobile industry. Many car companies and automotive suppliers have been relying on EPLAN’s powerful solutions for years. With our solutions, you can optimize the entire value chain in vehicle manufacturing.

Food and Beverage

EPLAN offers you solutions for engineering the control systems of machines and plant systems, supporting you in the creation, production, further processing and packaging of agricultural products into foods and beverages.

Energy

Code compliance, ensuring supply, optimizing load distribution: the energy sector faces many challenges. EPLAN offers you optimal solutions for a broad field of applications from energy management to plant system engineering.

Maritime

Digitalization, standardization and automation are all trends that no industrial sector can evade right now. This also holds true for the maritime industry. Integrated electrical engineering design and powerful ECAD software from EPLAN can significantly advance automation at your company.

Building Technology

Planning monitoring, control, regulation and optimization systems is an important part of technical facility management for many types of buildings. With EPLAN you can rely on a continuous and consistent database that goes far beyond just the engineering processes.

Added Value & Features

Creating Engineering Data, Circuit Diagrams and Schematics

EPLAN Electric P8 automatically generates detailed evaluations for you as an integral component of the project documentation – either on an ongoing basis or combined after project completion, as required. Downstream process steps then get all the necessary information from engineering: from integrated planning to manufacturing, commissioning, maintenance and repair.

Macro Technology

You can save up to 26 variants of a circuit or system for each representation type. With 12 different representation types, you have a total of 312 possible variants at your fingertips. You can easily manage your macro projects. Our drag-&-drop technology makes placing them simple – and the software remembers the original position. Thanks to macro technology, you can create a solid foundation for standardising your processes.

Placeholder Technology

Manage an unlimited number of data sets for your macros and quickly select the desired data set during the engineering design process.

Autoconnecting

Autoconnecting enables you to logically connect circuit symbols with one another in an instant, making schematics design faster and increasing the quality of the generated schematic.

Various Design Approaches

Choose between a graphical, a logical or device-oriented design approach to support various work processes.

Automatic Reports

Reports such as terminal and wire diagrams or bills of materials are automatically created for you to be used in downstream project phases.

Editing of Mass Data

Functions for editing mass data such as “Search and replace” and “Edit in Excel” accelerate your engineering and at the same time increase the quality for drawing circuit diagrams and schematics.

Internationale Codes, Consistently Localised

EPLAN Electric P8 supports global standards such as IEC, NFPA, the Russian GOST and the Chinese GB standards with corresponding master data and sample projects. Thanks to its end-to-end Unicode capability, the software generates circuit diagrams and schematics in a wide variety of languages based on your customised translation databases – from schematics in Chinese to bills of materials in Russian.

EPLAN Application Programming Interface (API)

With the EPLAN API development environment the doors to your individual further development of EPLAN Electric P8, EPLAN Fluid, EPLAN Preplanning and EPLAN Pro Panel are wide open. The development environment offers you an efficient possibility to implement your own required functionalities or automatic functions. With this individual customization in the core of EPLAN you can optimize your engineering workflow specifically.

Faster task-based processes

In the productive phase the EPLAN products can be integrated fully into your individual workflow through the API Runtime licenses. Use of the overall solution is thus facilitated for all participants. Processing times, planning errors and training times can be reduced. Users of other programs can use EPLAN functions and data without having to leave their original work environment. Results are thus available faster and more economically.

How-to

EPLAN Tutorials

Moving images explain things better! That’s why we’re providing free of charge tutorials that support you in the daily use of our solutions.

Trainings

EPLAN Training Academy

As an EPLAN expert, you can ensure that everything runs smoothly in your engineering department.

Brochure EPLAN Solutions

Solutions for Your Engineering

The EPLAN Platform and the EPLAN Cloud form the EPLAN Solutions - or in other words: the key to your future-oriented engineering.

EPLAN Platform

System Requirements

What hardware and software requirements should your system meet for the use of the EPLAN Platform?

Features

Highlights around the current release

Get an overview of innovative functionalities that make your project planning more efficient.

Services

We’re Here for You!

EPLAN offers you comprehensive services and support beyond our software. We are here to support you!

EPLAN Consulting

Our experienced EPLAN consultants will help you to utilize EPLAN solutions efficiently and introduce new engineering methods. In addition, the consultants can work with you to unlock the enormous potential for implementing integrated working processes in your company.

EPLAN Training Academy

The EPLAN Training Academy is your contact for all training questions relating to engineering. For example, you can train to become an EPLAN Certified Engineer (ECE) and benefit from our wide range of training courses.

EPLAN Solution Center

Are you stuck? No problem: EPLAN Support is available to you and offers professional support in your daily work. The EPLAN Solution Center is an online support system for EPLAN Software Service customers, where you can create tickets directly in the software.

EPLAN Experience

EPLAN Experience is a concept that highlights how you can achieve concrete process optimization. It shows you how to work in a functionally structured way and follow uniform standards. You can also increase your engineering efficiency step by step with a solid database.

User Reports & Customer Testimonials

EPLAN Electric P8 in Practice

Find out how companies use our solutions to address current technical and business developments and improve their productivity.

German SOFIA Institute (DSI)

EPLAN documentation for a unique "flying observatory"

The SOFIA research aircraft has now been operating for 8 years, enabling close observation of space by recording infrared radiation. The complex electrical engineering of this unique telescope has so far been available only on paper and in the form of PDF documents. The team of engineers and technicians at the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart are now using an EPLAN solution, precisely tailored to the special requirements of fundamental astronomical research.

KWS Saat SE

Parametrization instead of drawing

The majority of the 4,600 employees at KWS Saat SE are involved in the development of new seed varieties. The complex machines and systems required for seed processing and breeding are also manufactured in-house using the EPLAN Platform – beginning with P&I diagrams which are designed using the Preplanning module. The underlying principle is consistent, cross-disciplinary design processes from mechanical and process engineering through to fluid power and electrical engineering.

AL-KO THERM GmbH

Instrumentation and control engineering in HVAC systems

Good things sometimes come from chance events. Employees from AL-KO THERM GMBH were visiting an EPLAN booth at a tradeshow and by chance came across EPLAN Engineering Configuration (EEC) – the system that enables simple and consistent configuration of mechatronics systems. They now use EEC worldwide as a configurator and benefit from significantly simpler instrumentation and control (I&C) engineering.

Hanseatic Power Solutions GmbH

Electrical engineering – digital is faster

Jeddah, Mecca, Benin City. These are some of the locations where personnel from Hanseatic Power Solutions GmbH (HPS) have recently installed switchgear systems. Many systems are also travelling the high seas, i.e. on ships. Hanseatic Power Solutions (HPS) estimate that it takes just 6–8 weeks to design and construct highly complex switchgears – and they’re often even faster. This is possible only by electrical design being as consistent as possible and highly automated. In addition to EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Pro Panel, HPS is also using the “Copper” module and, just recently, the new EPLAN Cogineer.

More About This Topic

Efficient Engineering: Study Available for Download

Everyone is talking about Industry 4.0, intelligent networking, flexible production and smart logistics, and even robotics and big data applications. But what about the strategic digitization of design processes and designing control technology for machines and plant systems? The “Engineering 4.0” study by the European 4.0 Transformation Center (E4TC) at RWTH Aachen University shines a light on these issues.

Efficiency study “Engineering 4.0”

Researchers at the E4TC in Aachen introduced an engineering workflow model (among other things) and prepared an evaluation matrix with five efficiency levels. The “Efficiency Level Matrix” – with detailed statements about method workflows – is accompanied by a “Use Level Matrix”, which describes and evaluates the use of CAE software as the basic prerequisite for Engineering 4.0. The complete study is available from EPLAN free of charge.

We’re happy to help!

Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about EPLAN Electric P8. We’re looking forward to helping you.