Increasing engineering productivity is one of the top technology concerns for industrial companies heading into 2025. Enhancing design engineering productivity helps companies both acquire customers and reduce a variety of operational stressors, such as overcoming labor shortages and meeting tight delivery timelines.
For today’s panel shops and systems integrators, this means embracing automated panel building systems to increase throughput, accelerate speed-to-market, and execute more complex and precise panel building tasks. But with 2025 on the horizon, too many of these kinds of companies still rely on manual panel building processes.
Here, we’ll look at why this upcoming year is the time to invest in automated panel building systems, and what companies stand to gain from digitalizing their processes.
The need for more custom, precise panel building and modification
As the manufacturing landscape becomes more diverse, panel shops and systems integrators need the ability to produce customized panels for specific or unique environments. For instance, the energy & power industry is undergoing a significant shift in the common types of applications. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, wind and solar power installations, and battery storage applications can all require individualized panel processing.
Automated panel building systems make it possible to produce more custom panels without sacrificing precision and quality. Plus, automated panel building systems can incorporate digital design platforms to increase the operational flexibility and visibility of each job to help reduce production bottlenecks and errors.
Rittal’s Perforex Milling Terminal MT S provides reliable machining of mounting plates, doors, roof plates, side panels, gland plates, or unibody enclosures. Ideal for modifying Rittal’s most popular carbon and stainless steel enclosures, the Perforex MT S leverages an intuitive user interface where drawings can be viewed and updated in real time for maximum flexibility and scalability.
A leading manufacturer in the U.S. power distribution solutions market was grappling with a variety of all-too-common operational challenges, some of which included reducing labor costs, boosting throughput, and enhancing safety protocols. This manufacturer relied on Rittal to implement a Perforex MT milling machine to significantly increase processing speeds and reach a goal of 200 enclosure modifications per day.
The ability to adapt to demand fluctuations
Scaling throughout to meet market demand is a key element of doing business for panel shops and systems integrators. With a more manual panel processing approach, ramping up production usually means onboarding additional labor, a process that can be both costly and time consuming.
An automated panel processing solution that eliminates manual intervention not only creates a connected ecosystem with greater workflow flexibility and versatility, but also helps increase throughput times while enhancing the quality and precision of your panel modifications. Plus, it reduces the need to increase labor in service of controlling production costs and meeting delivery expectations.
A big component of panel building and modification is the panel wiring process. This is where Rittal’s Wire Terminal WT C enables more efficient wire processing on any scale, from individual to bulk wire assemblies.
The WT C offers flexible configuration, a quick-change system for wires, process reliability, three wire output methods, and a digitally supported process. Additionally, the WT C is adaptable and offers an expandable modular system structure to meet future requirements.
Integrating the WT C with Eplan’s Smart Wiring platform provides 3D modeling, interactive schematics, and real-time engineering data to increase the efficiency, productivity, and precision of your panel wiring processes. The data generated in Eplan’s Smart Wiring platform is also easily shareable to help panel builders or systems integrators reduce costly errors and optimize their production schedules.
The opportunity to use data-driven insights for process improvements
While increasing throughput and panel building efficiency are critical to revenue generation and growth, the opportunity to use schematic data and performance metrics to drive process improvements is another reason why 2025 is the year to invest in automated panel building systems.
With a manual panel building approach, there’s a level of uncertainty or lack of insight into data points like production capacity, operational costs, and waste. Incorporating automated panel building processes via digitalization helps eliminate data and communication silos, which also creates a data-driven approach to manufacturing that surfaces areas for process improvements.
This kind of data-driven manufacturing is enhanced by integrating a CAE software platform like Eplan that connects the end-to-end panel modification process via 3D panel modeling, data sharing, and digital twins.
The Perforex MT milling machine and W TC wire processing machine are part of the Rittal Automation Systems (RAS) suite of automated panel building and modification systems. The RAS suite is designed to help you optimize panel building processes by reducing manual interventions, increasing precision, and boosting throughput.