Powerful electrical CAD tool proves beneficial for electrical wiring and control systems

Piaggio Group, the Italian leader of the European powered two-wheeler vehicle market, has adopted Zuken’s E³.series to support increasing cabling complexity and volume and to enhance electrical design efficiency and quality. The E³.series is a powerful electrical CAD tool for electrical wiring, control systems and fluid engineering design. The Piaggio Group, which owns several prestigious scooter and motorcycle brands including Piaggio, Vespa, Aprilia and Moto Guzzi, faced changing requirements to their electrical design process. Global expansion brought an increase in the number of product specifications for different markets, so the company needed to streamline its design processes and reduce time-to-market to accommodate the increased scale of operations. Luigi Baracchino, electrical engineering manager, Piaggio, said: “We looked for a tool to give an end-to-end design path from schematic capture to physical design. One of the reasons E³.series stood out is its inbuilt electrical intelligence. This will help us reduce rework and add digital prototyping into our engineering design process to satisfy challenging time-to-market and quality demands. Piaggio Group previously used a generic rather than wiring harness-dedicated 2D design tool for cabling design, but it was unable to meet stringent new cost effectiveness, global parts unification and time efficiency targets. We selected E³.series after benchmarking several CAD tools.” Baracchino explained that E³.series also fulfilled the company's requirement to be able to exchange data with their existing 3D CAD tools: a virtual digital mock-up of the vehicle can be designed in advance, shortening the development time, reducing costs and, above all, increasing the overall product quality and reliability to a level not previously possible, says the company. The company is currently using E³.series at its engineering centre in Pontedera, Italy, and plans to roll out the software to other sites soon.