So if you’ve been following along over the past few weeks, we embarked on the journey of crafting a delicious home brew. And not just any brew though – a very
pungent and hoppy India Pale Ale (which, unfortunately, I still haven’t had a chance to try). Once we came up with our plan to conduct the first ever “SOLIDWORKS Brew Day,” there were several action items that we needed to complete before we even poured water into the kettles.

First we obviously needed to pick out the style of beer we wanted to brew. Without hesitation and before Earl (the head brewer) could even finish asking the question, we knew that it had to be an IPA. Next, came researching and developing the perfect recipe. This took some time, and depended heavily on the available ingredients from the vendor. Once the ingredients were purchased, we opted to make a what is known as a “yeast starter.” This step supports faster fermentation (plus a few additional benefits – such as pitching a higher cell count, and to simply verify the yeast is a good batch). One additional task before brewing, involved cleaning and sanitizing our equipment which can be a tedious task, but an absolute necessary one.

All of these so-called action items could probably be classified as preparations for our brew day. Without all of our prep-work, we still would’ve been able to make beer, but it’d probably be a mediocre one.

The same goes for preparing our electrical projects. There are a few important steps we recommend taking in order to use SOLIDWORKS Electrical effectively and efficiently.
The first step is working with our Value-Added Reseller and creating an implementation plan. This plan will benefit us by standardizing and streamlining our design process. Within this plan, there are several smaller items that may be beneficial for us to set up – including our wire manager, PLC configuration manager, ERP database connection, or simply adding our existing symbol library into our new SOLIDWORKS Electrical database.

For more information on this process, check out Episode 2 in our “Brewing with Electricity” mini-series where we show the preparations and planning we undertook while creating both our delicious homebrew and our detailed SOLIDWORKS Electrical home brewery schematic package.

If you are still looking for more great information on SOLIDWORKS Electrical including topics such as “How to create a template” or “Understanding Installations,” check out our videos on these more detailed topics at my.solidworks.com – simply search for Electric Brewery.

If you’re a fan of twitter, you can follow me @SWECAD

JP Emanuele

JP is a Territory Technical Manager, SOLIDWORKS Electrical, North America.