36AVEVA World Magazine 2012|Issue 2In the hydrocarbon industry alone, Electrical & Instrumentation systems (E&I) represent 29% of the world's capital expenditure on plant. In plant operations, E&I typically accounts for 60% of maintainable items, as well as being critical to safe and efficient operation, so there is a premium on right-first-time design, ease of maintenance, and control of information. Making ConnectionsHow new AVEVA technology is transforming productivity in electrical engineering and designYet E&I engineers have, until now, been poorly served, often obliged to make do with spreadsheets and simple drafting applications. This leads to considerable inefficiency and wasted effort. Worse still, such makeshift solutions create too many opportunities for errors which, if undetected, can give rise to potentially serious hazards. Even the most popular special-purpose applications are considered difficult to use and do not make sufficient use of the information they create.In 2009, recognising this need, AVEVA released AVEVA Instrumentation, a ground-breaking application which quickly became one of the company's fastest-growing products. So successful did this prove that customers almost immediately began asking for an electrical application with the same power and ease of use. Earlier this year we delivered on our promise with AVEVA Electrical, recognisably a sister product to AVEVA Instrumentation and featuring many similar productivity features.AVEVA Electrical Wiring Manager - Working on the same project, electrical engineers can see instrumentation objects and vice versa.Kelvin DavisMarketing Communications Manager

AVEVA World Magazine 2012|Issue 237Dave Gibson, AVEVA's Head of Business Management for E&I systems, explained, 'With AVEVA Instrumentation having set the benchmark for technology, features and productivity in this important market, we were starting from a very strong base. But we then invested a great deal of effort in developing AVEVA Electrical, working closely with lead customers to ensure that it fulfilled practical needs on real-world projects. They all agree that it is a real industry-leader.'With such a pedigree and an extensive range of functions and features unmatched by any competitor, AVEVA Electrical really hit the ground running, with early sales significantly exceeding expectations. Perhaps the most obvious feature of the new product is its extensive use of 'graphical engineering'. This alone is a powerful boost to productivity; by making repetitive or complex tasks considerably easier, it not only saves a great deal of work, it also eliminates many sources of error. So simple and intuitive is its interactive drag-and-drop interface that it is all the more surprising that competitor products had not already adopted such an approach.Dave continued, 'We engineers tend to be very visual people, so graphical interfaces are particularly productive features. But we also love spreadsheets for working with tabular data, so both products feature familiar spreadsheet interfaces for many of the engineering tasks. Users feel at home immediately and require very little product training.'But the spreadsheet is more than just a familiar visual metaphor; it reflects one of the most important features of both AVEVA Electrical and AVEVA Instrumentation - the ability to import legacy data. As technology advances, handling legacy data assets can be a serious obstacle to upgrading. And even when data conversion methods are well understood, in practice many migration projects can run into unexpected problems. But AVEVA Electrical is exceeding all expectations here also.Because the product supports the Excel data format, it can import data from any source or application that also supports it. And because engineering data is invariably indexed by tag number, the imported data can be immediately compatible, not only with AVEVA Electrical, but with other AVEVA products, such as AVEVA Engineering. AVEVA Electrical can actually add value to a company's existing data assets.Dave Gibson commented, 'Already, customers have had impressive success in this area. Without any training or support from our engineers, one user imported an entire installation's electrical systems data - some 35,000 instruments, 20,000 cables and 16,000 loops - with no difficulties at all.'AVEVA Electrical comprises three integrated modules, Engineer, Wiring Manager and Designer, which share a common database and handle complementary tasks and information. The Engineer module is used for defining or importing equipment data, tracking changes, creating and managing reports and documentation, and so on. Its unique feature is its 'graphical engineering' approach, whereby tabular information is presented in easily understood diagram form, similar to Single Line Diagrams (SLDs). It enables the creation of an unlimited number of diagrams and levels of detail, from the complete power distribution system right down to an individual switchboard tag. 'With AVEVA Instrumentation having set the benchmark for technology, features and productivity in this important market, we were starting from a very strong base. But we then invested a great deal of effort in developing AVEVA Electrical, working closely with lead customers to ensure that it fulfilled practical needs on real-world projects. They all agree that it is a real industry-leader...'AVEVA Electrical Wiring Manager Module - Management of cables and terminations.www.aveva.com/45years