Faster designing

The specialist in hydraulic systems solutions Viereck & Co, based in Elmshorn in Germany, has over 50 years of expertise in hydraulics. The systems developed and manufactured by the company are used in the shipbuilding industry and in machinery and pressure applications. In addition to this, the company supplies parts for wind energy installations and for niche applications such as cooling systems in theatre technology. Viereck has been combining hydraulics and electronics successfully for a period of five years. This creates an even wider range of solutions for renowned customers including Airbus, ABB, Macor Marine and ThyssenKrupp.

Complicated hydraulic power sources and control systems require the highest quality standards. To meet these standards, Viereck is continuously looking into the newest technologies to ensure the quality can be guaranteed while the hydraulic systems can be supplied as quickly as possible. To realise various hydraulic applications for a wide range of customers, the company needed smart software to design and produce hydraulic systems of a high quality in a standardised manner.

The company opted to use the HydroSym software package several years ago. Tradition CAD/CAM software required the manual development of parts in hydraulics schematics, says Ulf Kaschewitz, engineering director at Viereck. Many services and functionalities for the fast and reliable creation of schematics for a hydraulic system in the HydroSym software are missing in standard CAD software. If you create a schematic in HydroSym, you select a component or a symbol from the supplied library. You only need one click to create every desired connection between components. Those connections remain in place when you move components to different positions in the schematic. Thanks to the “pack&save” functionality you can create a zipped file that includes a PDF document of the schematic as well as the datasheets of the components used in the schematic.These kinds of possibilities in the programme show that Paro Software knows better than anyone else what is needed for the design of hydraulic systems. The design software is created in such a way that the development and documentation of a hydraulic system occurs in an optimal manner.

It is no longer necessary to manually create frequently used symbols for regulating elements of the hydraulic system, which has given the design software a different role within Viereck. 

Within our organisation, sales employees have also started using HydroSym, continues Kaschewitz. The software contains a complete library of standard units for hydraulic systems that makes it very easy to quickly and easily add the necessary characteristics to the design. All the information about these components has been linked as well, so that you can access the information within the programme. In addition to this, the interface of the software package is user friendly and fully intuitive. You can easily create the design by clicking and dragging standard components from the library. Functional connections can be labelled and drawn quickly via connecting lines.

Kaschewitz states the designing of a hydraulic system for the steering of a bridge windlass has become as easy as the designing and drawing of a kitchen. Sales-personnel of a kitchen retailer drag and drop the required equipment and units quickly onto the design on the screen with the customers right by their side. Because all product details, including the price, are linked to this design, the customer can easily be offered an accurate quotation based on this design. In a similar manner, the sales personnel of Viereck using HydroSym can offer a detailed and accurate quote to its customers in a short space of time and without specialist knowledge.