Case study 08 · Electrical Panels · Design to drawing

From a requirement to the single-line diagram, the BOM, the drawing and the 3D view — one flow.

Tulsi Powertech Infra LLP builds low-voltage panels in Sachin GIDC, Surat — PCC, MCC, APFC, PLC, bus ducts and more — for contractors and OEMs. A panel used to begin as a requirement in someone's head and end as a bill of materials in Excel, with the drawing done separately.

PanelDesk makes the requirement the input. The single-line diagram follows from it, the bill of materials follows from the diagram, and the general-arrangement drawing and a 3D view follow from the BOM — all against a catalogue of 108,708 parts from 65 makes.

Client

Tulsi Powertech Infra LLP

Industry

LV Panel Building · Switchgear

Location

Surat, Gujarat

Workflow

D · Panel design & costing

108,708

Parts in the catalogue across 65 makes, 95,330 of them priced — refreshed nightly.

1.09 s

To regenerate the bill of materials for a 16-feeder panel: 186 lines.

Same day

The design-to-drawing stage — requirement, SLD, 2D GA and 3D — built and live in one stretch.

What we shipped · 9 stages

Requirement form → single-line diagram: the requirement is the input, and the SLD toolbar only offers what the requirement allows.

SLD → BOM engine with a learning loop, so a corrected line teaches the next generation.

Rules engine, selection tables and an import wizard for the sheets the drawing office already had.

Wiring stage, then quotations and costing with the real component prices behind every line.

One vendor catalogue — 108,708 parts, 65 makes — fed nightly from a central price source.

Master Config templates and bundles so a standard feeder is one pick, not twenty.

2D general-arrangement drawing: dimensioned, editable, exported as a PDF set and DXF.

3D derived from the 2D — layers, exploded view, measure, PNG and GLB export.

A BOM tab that mirrors the compare-across-makes screen, with an SLD ↔ BOM difference popup so nothing silently drifts.

01 — The challenge

Eight panels, forty-three feeders, four hundred lines — all in a spreadsheet.

The whole design method lived in one workbook: a real job with 8 panels, 43 feeders and 431 BOM lines across 111 components. It worked, until it had to be costed — every component carried no price, so a quotation totalled zero until someone filled it in by hand. And a sheet that said one busbar density while the weight was computed with another had already gone out to a client.

The drawing was a separate exercise again. Nothing linked the requirement to the diagram, the diagram to the parts list, or the parts list to the general arrangement.

02 — What we built

The requirement drives everything downstream.

PanelDesk went live on 8 August 2026, the day of its first commit, and has been extended in 228 commits since. The order was deliberate: first the requirement form and the SLD it produces, then the BOM engine, then rules and selection tables, wiring, costing and the vendor catalogue with real prices.

The design-to-drawing stage came in one stretch on 13–14 September: requirement and SLD fused into one editor, Master Config templates with bundles, a dimensioned 2D general-arrangement drawing with PDF and DXF export, and a 3D view derived from it. Seventeen live panels were migrated forward with nothing dropped.

03 — The results

A parts list that costs itself, and a drawing that follows.

The catalogue behind every line holds 108,708 parts with 95,330 prices, and a nightly refresh carried 34,182 price changes without a single part going from priced to unpriced. Regenerating the BOM for a 16-feeder panel takes about a second.

Every stage passed its production checks — 627 automated tests for the design-to-drawing release — and the BOM screen now matches the quotation portal our other panel client uses, so a drawing-office habit learnt on one is the same on the other.

Before · After

Tulsi Powertech's panel design workflow: before vs after PanelDesk
Metric	Before	After
Starting point	A BOM spreadsheet per job	A requirement form that generates the SLD
Component prices	Blank until filled by hand	108,708 parts, 95,330 priced, refreshed nightly
Drawing	Separate exercise	2D GA and 3D derived from the BOM
Regenerating a 16-feeder BOM	Re-typed	186 lines in 1.09 s

Designing panels in a spreadsheet and drawing them twice?

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