A Furnace Engineering Company’s Blend for Success

April 22, 2022

GNA Alutech time savings in design, a recipe that boils down to EPLAN

A global leader in aluminum recycling
We often hear that everything old becomes new again, which serves to highlight the importance of recycling primary resources. Aluminum is a product that best represents this rule. Aluminum is light, does not rust and is used everywhere. But did you know that 75% of the aluminum in circulation around the world is recycled? Part of this cycle can be attributed to a company like GNA.

GNA Alutech is a recognized world leader in the design and construction of industrial furnaces. This includes melting and holding furnaces; homogenizing, annealing and heat treatment furnaces; cathode sealing equipment as well as associated machinery.

Documenting projects with EPLAN
The company offers end-to-end solutions for the design, production, installation, and service of these types of furnaces and related machinery. EPLAN is used by GNA throughout their projects because it allows the company to ensure the highest level of quality, avoid errors and provides a way to improve the company’s efficiency. This is extremely important given the size of their projects which frequently require upwards of 400 PLC inputs/outputs.

“Managing the electrical connections for these types of projects can be a headache,” explains Adrian Horhogea, Electrical engineer at GNA. “By using EPLAN, we get much clearer documentation. All the information we need is on the schematics,” he adds.

EPLAN generates the entire connection list and since that list is corrected through EPLAN’s revision management feature, the designers can be sure that the final list they are producing is error free. This allows electrical contractors to simply follow the step-by-step instructions for easy implementation, without the need to constantly refer to the entire lot of schematics.

Speeding up projects by over 50%
One of the ways GNA takes advantage of this is by dividing complex wiring phases into multiple smaller tasks. The company can decide to do the wiring in parallel with multiple wiring technicians working simultaneously on their own specific part of a project that will oftentimes span hundreds of pages. According to Horhogea, this allows the company to save over 50% of the time it would take otherwise.

GNA started using EPLAN 5 years ago and has found that it is an extremely powerful tool for compagnies doing large installations. Horhogea recalls a project for one of their clients that highlights how EPLAN helped the company meet their deadline.

“We were given 40 days by our client to tear down, remove the electrical installation, clean up and return the furnace to operation. A few days into the project, unexpected changes were made, requiring us to make corrections to the components, cables, and routing. This could have been a disaster for us and our client.”

“But thanks to using EPLAN, we were able to revise the schematics and create new plans within 1 hour. It allowed us to go to production with the correct specifications. Despite the unexpected challenges, we managed to complete the project in 11 days.”

Without EPLAN, carrying out a project of that size from beginning to end this quickly would have been impossible. Over the years, GNA has managed to increase the level of satisfaction of their customers and technicians thanks to the use of a powerful engineering software like EPLAN, helping the company complete projects that are faster, reliable, accurate and efficient.

For more information, visit https://gna.ca/en/ and https://www.eplancanada.com/en/