When Schirmer Maschinen GmbH needed to strip down and rebuild a large machine for a trade show, the routine was familiar: disconnect sections, deal with the control cabinets, rewire, test and commission. Traditionally, that process took around four days. With a control cabinet-free approach using Beckhoff’s MX-System, Schirmer cut the rebuild time to around four hours. Here, Neil March, product specialist for the MX-System at Beckhoff, explains why removing the control cabinet reshapes machine design.
Cutting the build time from four days to four hours is an attention-grabbing figure, but it’s not the real story here. The bigger point is what needed to change for that speed-up to be possible. Removing the control cabinet is not simply a different way to mount components. It prompts a rethink of how machines are structured, assembled and supported.
In practice, it can shift the electrical build from a late-stage bottleneck into something that happens earlier, more modularly and with fewer manual steps.
The control cabinet is a design decision
Control cabinets earned their place for good reasons. They centralise electronics, protect equipment and provide engineers with a familiar place to wire, test and troubleshoot. Over time, though, the cabinet has become a magnet for complexity. As machines have become more connected, more instrumented and more automated, the cabinet has had to accommodate more devices, more cooling, more safety and more wiring.
The challenge is not only physical size – it’s the process involved. In conventional builds, much of the electrical installation and commissioning happens late, when the machine is already assembled and access is awkward. Schirmer described this as a mismatch with modular machine building, where you want to pre-assemble and validate modules efficiently.
That is where “cabinet-free” becomes a design lever. If the control infrastructure can move onto the machine, engineers are no longer forced into a single, central wiring hub. They can start to align electrical design with mechanical modularity.
From custom wiring to pluggable assembly
The MX-System is built around a baseplate and function modules that provide the tasks typically housed in a cabinet, including control, I/O, power distribution, switching and drives, in a robust housing suitable for mounting directly on a machine.
The practical impact is a change in how work is done. Wiring is one of the most time-consuming parts of a conventional cabinet build. It is estimated that wiring can account for around 49 per cent of the time required to manufacture and assemble a control cabinet. When you move to a modular, pre-engineered approach with pre-assembled cabling and consistent interfaces, you reduce the scope for manual point-to-point wiring and the errors that follow.
The shift means a cabinet configuration that might take 24 hours to set up can be assembled in about one hour, including testing, using an MX-System approach. Another benefit is an 80 per cent reduction in circuit diagrams and parts lists, because one function module replaces multiple conventional components.
None of that removes the need for engineering judgement. Motors still need sizing, current loads still matter and safe design still requires expertise. What changes is where the effort goes. Less time is spent on repetitive wiring and rework, and more on building the machine’s functionality.
Machine layout, footprint and serviceability
Once control is distributed, machine layout becomes more flexible. Putting automation closer to sensors and actuators reduces cable runs and can simplify installation. It also changes the footprint discussion. Control cabinets often consume valuable floor space and can constrain where equipment can be placed. In Schirmer’s case, removing cabinets improved access to machine structures and reduced space requirements on the shop floor.
Serviceability also looks different. Instead of opening a cabinet and fault-finding around dense wiring, diagnostic visibility shifts into the system itself. Each MX module carries a unique DataMatrix code that can be scanned using a smartphone. Using Beckhoff’s diagnostics app, maintenance teams can call up live diagnostic information for the relevant module, including status and stored error data, helping to speed up troubleshooting and module replacement.
To add to this, Daniel Siegenbrink, Product Manager MX System, explains that “the end-to-end pluggability and the use of the diagnostic app as a replacement for the multimeter means that no specially trained electricians are required to connect or replace the MX-System modules.”
Why four days to four hours matters
Cutting a multi-day task to a few hours isn’t just a nice logistics story. It reflects a deeper shift: designing machines so that electrical build and commissioning can be done in a modular, repeatable way, with fewer hidden dependencies inside a cabinet. Schirmer’s managing director, Ludger Martinschledde, puts the change in design terms: “The MX-System is changing the face of design and installation in the world of machine building.”
When the control cabinet stops being the default centre of gravity, the machine itself becomes the platform. That is how you end up with a machine that can be dismantled, shipped, reconnected and made ready again in hours, not days.
You can find out more about the MX-System and the case study in this article by visiting the Beckhoff website and downloading the whitepaper.
