Engineering Base is the new and innovative design software for the electrical engineering community. Creating electrical design documentation with Engineering Base is faster and easier than ever. Engineering Base combines Microsoft Office Visio, with Microsoft SQL Server, the powerful enterprise relational database management and analysis system. Electrical diagrams are drawn with Visio and all data is managed with the SQL Server.
Reinhard Knapp, Product Manager

In order to manage your engineering project, you need to work with different sets of tools. This tool set consists of text processing, a electrical CAD tool to create system documentation, and either spreadsheets or a small database application to handle bills of materials, wiring lists, and purchase order lists. The amount of data produced can easily create large numbers of files of many differing types. Plus, all references to items located in these different files have to be updated manually. Keeping track of all this information can be cumbersome, to say the least. Relatively few employees have the skill, the time, and a license to use a CAD system. And only a few know how CAD files, spread sheets, and text documents are truly related in this situation.

The above tool set offers little support when starting a new project. A typical approach is to find and copy a spreadsheet from a comparable project and edit the item list. But it's time consuming to find suitable CAD files, copy them to a new folder, update all the file names, then edit the text blocks and item labels in all the CAD files. All the while, you need to ensure that all links and references remain accurate. Furthermore, if more than one person is working on a project it gets even more complicated. How to access data and keep everything up to date becomes a critical factor in the success of the entire project.