Couach Yachts

Electrical design and cable routing at Couach Yachts

By using Trace Elec Pro since 2002, the electrical engineering department produces the electrical schematics for 20 yachts each year.

The leading French manufacturer of luxury yachts made of composite materials, the company Couach Yachts create at their Arcachon site, tailor made designs that reach 37m in length and 7m in breadth.

Founded in 1897 and specialized in high-price range boats of big size, the company Couach Yachts brings together 300 craftsmen at their site, and proposes customized services: right from the choice of wood, textiles, interior design, and special requested fittings. In 1996, following a change in management, it was decided to restructure and reinforce the engineering consulting department and to add the electrical wing that was entirely outsourced earlier.

The electrical consulting wing comprising of 2 people working on AutoCAD, then decided to get some specialized software. Compared to other software that were thought to be too complex, Trace Elec Pro was then chosen for it’s user-friendliness and the fact that it is available as a single package without any additional modules, which helped the engineering consulting firm become operational very quickly. It is thus that 20 boats see the light of day at the engineering consulting firm, most of them big yachts- certain smaller ones are sub-contracted and one-fourth of them are the stars of length 14m for military use on serial order. That represents 80 boats designed using Trace Elec Pro since its purchase, but this tool has also helped them create schematics for other purposes like their new factory premises.

Taking off from a project template with existing schematics prepared for the boats of the same size, the consulting firm studies the customized interior designs that the client wants in terms of number of cabins, other special requests which require special type of power supplies and different protective devices, (for example Jacuzzi, pressure maintenance device for deep sea diving, desalination instruments, etc. ) and all this while respecting the international naval norms.
A team of 10 to 20 electricians take up the relay: while one team takes up the cable layout in the electrical cupboards, the other team takes the responsibility of laying out the cables in the paths that pass through the reinforcements on the hull of the boat.

In order to adapt the software tool to the specific nature of the naval sector, the consulting firm included its own product catalogue comprising in especially some protective devices with very high rating contiguous current. Some symbols also were created: for example bi-directional switches for reversing current direction.

Trace Elec Pro’s database has all the necessary information, to create the bill of materials that their purchase department is able to recover this list through their internal software. Another important distinguishing feature for this sector that is aimed at the export market is that Trace Elec Pro can produce multi-language projects, by directly feeding the database and not having to redo the translation on each drawing sheet.

Obtaining the necessary information in the database of Trace Elec Pro, the Research Department then furnished the list of material and equipment to command that the Purchase service recovers via their proper internal software.

Other advantage of Trace Elec Pro in a sector turned to the export, that is the possibility to obtain multilingual folders by bringing directly the translations in the database without have to annotate all the folios.

* A new generation of software, integrating the functionalities of Trace Elec Pro and presenting a more intuitive ergonomy more intuitive is henceforth available: it is about the solution elecworks. Since the writing of this article, various customers have migrated to the elecworks solutions.

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