Scalable Drawing Standards that work with AutoCAD Electrical

[Anonymous]

I work for a growing company and we're looking completely redo our electrical prints. We primarily design equipment for North America. I've looked at any standards I can get my hands on including IEC style prints. There are certain things that I like about them all and other things that I find confusing. I want something that not only gives us flexible organization that's scalable, but also modularity to reduce overall design time once we get the new system defined/setup. 

We have a job number that we use as our serial number that's 4 digits and two letters. (i.e. 2244XX)

We use a WBS (Work Breakdown System) or Sections to breakdown our projects. 

211 could be for a robot

215 might be for an infeed conveyor line

217 might be for a pallet dispenser that we've designed

Some of our upper management would like us to try to follow a system from a company that we do work with. Basically, it would mean that everything in the section of drawings for a WBS or Section number would start with that number.

So if it was a component number might be 2151514DR

WBS/Section Number: 215

Sheet number: 15

Line number: 14

Component Type: DR (Drive)

Wire numbers would be something like 2151514A then sequence through the alphabet 2151514A, 2151514B, 2151514C. 

The overall mindset is that anything for that WBS/Section number would be on those sheets, but this gets very complicated and creates a lot of extra drawings. It also makes our wire numbers and component tags very lengthy. 

This system brings up many questions, but the first two are below.

       1. How do you distribute the I/O rack points through the drawings without getting them mixed up or repeating addresses?

      2. We use distribution blocks along with other fieldbus blocks like IO Link, AS-I, etc. How do you efficiently break these blocks apart? We currently show a block on a single sheet because it might have sensors that cross into other WBS/Section numbers. 

      So what I'm looking for is examples of scalable systems that work for other custom machine builders. Does anyone have any structures they've implemented into ACADE that work for them? Anyone willing to share or provide constructive and helpful input?