Last week I had a chance to catch up with Eric van Essen, product group manager from Javelin Technologies, the Canadian company responsible for selling our dedicated SolidWorks electrical CAD solution, E³.WireWorks, across Canada. I wanted him to share his insights into the Canadian electrical design market, trends that he is seeing on the ground, and what he sees as driving innovation in the organizations they are working with.
Eric van Essen, product group manager from Javelin Technologies
Question: What industries are leading the way in Canada at the moment?
Answer: Canada has a broad range of industries and the specific ones depend heavily on the geographical location. Ontario and Quebec have a fairly large machinery and automation sector, Alberta and Newfoundland have a large oil and gas sector, and spread around the country are large heavy vehicle design and manufacturing. With recent government incentives, we have also found there to be a spike in the solar industry.
Question: What trends have you noticed in electrical design at the moment?
Answer: There are definitely more electrical and mechanical teams that have started working more closely together. With the tighter timelines for deliverables I don’t think they really have a choice. I believe this has been one of the catalysts for mechanical and electrical – working more closely together – plus the desire to gain a higher degree of control over cabling documentation.
As for specific design trends, Rockwell Automation has come out with some very nice “on machine” controllers that seem to be developing a trend towards smaller panels and more devices on-board the machine. See our blog posting
Question: Talking specifically about E³.WireWorks now…what sort of functionality most excites your clients?
Answer: With our broad range of clients comes a broad range of excitement. We find that machinery and automation designers are extremely focused on speed and ease of use of everyday tasks like device naming, connection drawing and report generation.
The customers we are working with in the oil and gas industry are most interested in the integration between various disciplines of schematics. See our blog posting
And the larger vehicle producers are trying to manage complex cable harnesses that are very cumbersome to do manually.
Question: What sort of companies are you partnering up with?
Answer: Rockwell Automation is a prime example. They see the power of mechanical and electrical working more closely together and they like the progress that we have made in that space.
Question: Are there any particular external factors driving customers towards innovation?
Answer: I would say that the number one driving force is definitely global competition and decreased development time. I also have found that designers are less patient than they used to be and are demanding more efficient ways to do their work. I believe that a typical designer can identify pretty quickly what areas of their day to day jobs can be automated by using the right tools. Lastly, quality requirements are continuously increasing.
To find out more about Javelin Technologies, hop over to their website . They also have their own blog which is well worth checking out.
The post Reseller Spotlight: Javelin Technologies appeared first on Zuken Blog.