Eplan accelerates electrical control cabinet design with AI assistant
Eplan, a German company in electrical engineering software, aimed to automate and simplify the design of control cabinets and mounting plates for manufacturing clients. Traditional processes relied heavily on manual design, repetitive data searches, and risked inefficiency. Eplan leveraged its massive Data Portal, containing over 2 million electrical engineering components curated to an industry data standard, as a foundation to train AI-driven solutions. Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Eplan developed the Eplan Copilot—an AI assistant embedded in their CAD environment. Eplan Copilot interprets engineers' requirements, generates custom 3D mounting plate layouts, and produces circuit diagrams tailored to unique orders by searching and reusing existing data whenever possible. This eliminates the need for engineers to repetitively search component databases and re-create established design patterns, thus reducing errors and project timelines. The AI solution enhances engineering workflow, increases efficiency, reuses validated data, and accelerates time-to-market for electrical control cabinet manufacturing.
- Organization
- Eplan
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Location
- Germany
- Published
- April 2025
Reported outcomes
Strategic outcomes
Why do we believe this deployment?Customer identity, provider attribution, maturity, and source checks
- Customer
- Eplan
- Provider
- Microsoft
- Maturity
- Unknown
- Linked source
- industrie-digitalisierung.com
No explicit deployment-stage evidence found.
Primary read
Use case focus
Showing 3 of 3
- 1AI-Assisted Control Cabinet Design
- 2Automated Generation of 3D Mounting Plates and Circuit Diagrams
- 3Engineering Workflow Automation
- Engineering teams spend significant time on repetitive, manual control cabinet and mounting plate design tasks.
- Inefficiency caused by repeated searches through large component databases.
- Need to minimize manual errors and reduce overall engineering workload.
- Limited reuse of past designs for new projects, leading to unnecessary effort.
- Developed Eplan Copilot, an AI assistant leveraging Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
- Integrated Copilot into the Eplan CAD system to automate engineering tasks and interpret project requirements.
- Utilized Eplan Data Portal’s standardized dataset of 2 million components for AI-driven design automation.
- Enabled automated generation of 3D mounting plates and wiring diagrams tailored to customer specifications.
- Significantly reduced engineering and design time for control cabinets.
- Increased efficiency and accuracy in project execution.
- Enhanced reuse of previously validated design data.
- Accelerated product delivery for manufacturing clients.
Architecture
The Eplan Copilot uses Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to interpret engineers' requirements and generate design outputs. The system leverages the Eplan Data Portal—a standardized collection of 2 million components—as its primary knowledge base, and integrates directly with the Eplan CAD engineering environment to automate the creation of 3D mounting plates and circuit diagrams.
Sources & evidence3
- Customer explicitly identified
- Technical implementation details available
- Multiple corroborating sources available
AI-generated summary. Verify important details with the linked sources before relying on this case.
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