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ROUND UP
“T
he three main challenges facing CIOs and IT managers when
delivering infrastructure to the organisation are time to
market, the cost to do so and the risk involved,” according to Paul
Cant, area vice president for Iberia, Africa and the Middle East at
BMC Software
. “With the increased adoption of cloud services the
time to market challenge can be solved, this is a big focus area for
African business to automate end to end IT processes in order to
reduce costs and re-assign valuable resources all within a secure
software platform.”
Cant says that Africa is a key growth market for the company
with a similar maturity level as Spain in some areas. He adds that
currently organisations are using some departmental software tools
to automate point solutions. A good example of this would be the
server build teams or administration teams where there are silos of
people operating different tools to accomplish one business process
of provisioning full stack infrastructure adding unnecessary delay risk
and cost.This is further compounded by the heterogeneous nature of
the infrastructure that is being managed and ultimately means that
there are many resources needed to manage the different tasks in the
data centre. “At BMC we take automation a level higher to enterprise
level management covering all the tasks required by the IT support
teams across physical, virtual and cloud all within one purpose built
automation platform with one user interface.This then reduces cost
and frees up valuable 2
nd
and 3
rd
level resources
allowing these resources
to then focus on service
improvement work, de-
liver more projects and
provide a better service
to the business and end
users.”
Enquiries: Sonia Salgado.
Email Sonia_Salgado@
bmc.com.
S
olution provider EPLAN has taken over the development and
sales rights to Harness Expert, the established 3D/2D software for
cable harness engineering.The contract between software developer
Linius Technologies and EPLAN Software & Service was signed in
June 2012. This extension to its range will allow EPLAN to offer its
customers even more comprehensive support for all aspects of cable
project management. EPLAN is now able to tackle new segments of
industry, including apparatus engineering, rail and specialist vehicle
technology, aviation, telecommunications and medical technology.
At the same time, there is an increasing demand from within its own
customer base for the implementation of 1:1 connections via cable
harnesses, as the number of circuit board based units in control
cabinets and devices is increasing constantly.This new software is the
perfect complement to EPLAN Electric P8, the company's own CAE
solution which has previously handled the engineering of single wires
and sheathed cables in the control cabinet and field components.
Customers can benefit from this consistent process integration, as
all phases of the engineering process are supported, from planning
through engineering through to cable harness design and production.
Open for the IT market
Harness Expert is an easy-to-use software suite which fully supports
all aspects of cable harness engineering. Typical harness or wiring
loom design processes are shown by the software in 3D. All 2D
production documents are produced by the system, which allows
comprehensive openness when it comes to the import and expert of
third party systems in design, administration and production. Inte-
gration between EPLAN Electric P8 and Harness Expert provides all
relevant wiring information, such as wire specifications, source and
target information and bundle and socket assignments.
Design of mechanical systems and cable harness
The software provides different flexible approaches to designing a
cable harness. Typically, this involves importing a 3D model from
a conventional 3D CAD system, which then checks both the routes
and design aspects such as clamps, clips, safety measures required
and length calculations within the digital model. This does away
with the time consuming and expensive construction of prototypes.
As an alternative to importing, things can be done in a simpler way.
Reports and test runs
Harness Expert uses the 3D or 2D cable harness layout to produce a
wide range of reports required for quotation, ordering and produc-
tion. Complete or individual parts lists, plug and splice lists, wiring
and connection lists and reports on working processes in order to
calculate time and costs. The data can be transferred directly to
cable finishing systems such as Komax. In order to validate the
cable harness design, the system has extensive, practical testing
and checking functions for bending radii, fill levels, cable lengths,
bundles without wires and connectors. The aim is to identify pos-
sible inconsistency and errors at an early stage, ie prior to prototype
production and simplify corrections. EPLAN is represented in South
Africa by its official distribution partner and certified training centre,
BLM Software & Service
.
Enquiries:Tel. 011 840 0840 or email gerhard.b@eplan.co.za.
Automation + cloud - next step in Africa
Comprehensive support for cable project management
Control systems and automation
Electricity+Control
September ‘12
12