Using AutoCAD Electrical with Autodesk Vault

By Forrest Judd
Solutions Engineer - MCAD
Hagerman & Company
Nashville, TN

AutoCAD Electrical is Autodesk’s solution for Electrical Schematic design. It is a fantastic tool that eliminates errors, reduces repetitive and tedious tasks, and introduces real intelligence to your electrical schematics.

But what about document management? Electrical projects can often include dozens of drawing files, and these drawing files are all associated. They depend upon each other for cross-referencing, wire numbering, panel/schematic symbol associativity, etc. Managing all of those files can be tedious, and if multiple people need to work on the same project simultaneously, it can be difficult to keep track of who did what to the files, and when the changes were made.

Autodesk Vault has been offering Inventor users the ability to manage, find, and easily reuse data for a few years now. But did you realize it does the same for AutoCAD Electrical?

Why use Vault with AutoCAD Electrical?

Security

The primary benefit of Vault still remains document security – you know who did what to which files, and when they did it. But another, often overlooked aspect of security involves document history. Most companies perform regular backups of their CAD data. Unfortunately these backups are often stored on a tape and filed away by someone in the IT department, making their availability somewhat limited.

Vault offers instant access to previous versions of your documents.

Figure 1. Document Version History

Did you just accidentally renumber all of the wires in your project without creating a zipped backup? No worries, just restore the latest Vault version and continue on your way. Did the mechanical guys change their mind for the fourth time in three weeks about that motor on the conveyor, leading you back to where you started? You have at your fingertips the design ‘as it was’. You can make any previous version of a document the latest one with just a few clicks.

Locating Documents

“I wish I could remember what project I worked on for Customer ABC last summer – they want to order two more systems.” A thought like that is often followed by minutes or even hours of searching through folders, files, and co-worker’s brains to dig up a drawing set that you need to re-use. In the worst case, a fruitless search leads to the recreation of work you know you’ve already done at least once.

A great benefit of Autodesk Vault is its powerful searching capabilities. Thanks to its ability to index both AutoCAD block attributes and custom AutoCAD file properties, Vault offers fantastic advantages in the daily struggle of locating your files. When you push AutoCAD Electrical file information (such as project and drawing descriptions, sheet numbers, etc) into your titleblock, Vault can use that data to help you locate your documents.

Figure 2. Autodesk Vault’s Searching Capabilities

Data Reuse

Ok, so you’ve finally found the project you worked on last summer. Without Vault, how do you reuse the data? True, AutoCAD Electrical does offer a Copy Project utility. While effective, the utility requires that you open AutoCAD Electrical and step through multiple dialog boxes to complete the operation.

Figure 3. Copy Design in Autodesk Vault

Vault’s Copy Design functionality greatly simplifies the process of reusing existing data. It even includes support for AutoCAD Electrical support files, such as titleblock mapping (WDT) files.

AutoCAD Electrical’s Project manager supports Vault operations as well, making it simple to access your newly copied project:

Figure 4. Project Manager Vault Integration

Within seconds your new project is not only ready for modifications, but it’s already stored safely in the vault.

Collaboration

No engineering department is an island. We’re constantly sharing data with vendors, customers, and internal consumers. Vault offers some great tools to help share your data in either DWG or DWF format.

By default the Vault will create DWF copies of every drawing you add. The DWF format is a fantastic way to communicate your design without giving it away.

Figure 5. DWF preview in Vault Explorer

With DWF, you can quickly send files via email, or even print right from Vault Explorer. With the now freely-available Design Review software, recipients can review and mark up the DWFs you send them. Upon return, you can load those DWFs into AutoCAD Electrical to see their markups – making sure you don’t miss any important changes.

Figure 6. Markups from Design Review to AutoCAD Electrical

If you need to send an entire drawing package in either DWG or DWF Format, you can use Vault’s Pack and Go functionality to make sure you don’t miss anything. Finally, Vault’s DWF auto-publish feature can make DWF versions of your documents available to other parts of the company that don’t use AutoCAD or the Vault.

A Totally New Experience

For years, Electrical schematic design has been a tedious, manual process. AutoCAD Electrical provides a fantastic set of tools to eliminate that tedium while simultaneously reducing errors and improving productivity. Autodesk Vault is an integral part of that toolset – a part that should most definitely not be overlooked.