The Production of Automotive Wiring Harness (1)

Today's major international automotive Wiring Harness manufacturers, such as Aptiv, LEONI and Yazaki, offer the highest quality, extremely flexible products in very small batches without any loss of quality. We are a customized Wire Harness manufacturer, capable of producing and processing Energy Storage Wire Harness, industrial Power Wire Harness, Medical Equipment Wire Harness and military wire harnesses. We are very experienced in the Cable Assembly processing industry. Certainly, Automotive wiring harnesses are no exception, including original automotive wiring harnesses and current new energy wiring harnesses.
The production of automotive wiring harnesses is very labor-intensive - the manual labor part accounts for 95% of the cost - which is why manufacturers are looking for manufacturing bases in countries with low labor costs. For this, a large number of new employees must be recruited and trained, which in turn affects efficiency and quality. As such, failure prevention is a critical factor in manufacturing, as is full traceability to isolate failures in the event of a recall.
The process begins with the design and development of the wiring harness. Vehicle manufacturers provide wiring harness manufacturers with 150% drawings of their in-vehicle wiring system designs. This includes all possible variants of the harness, all possible options based on a specific vehicle model.
The wire harness manufacturer's engineers use this drawing to create production drawings, work plans, and corresponding parts lists. However, manufacturers regularly post schedule changes, and plans must be adjusted based on each of these updates.
As always, where manual activities are involved, especially if these have to be done under time pressure, the error rate is high. Also, manual implementation depends on an individual's working method, and production schedules may look different depending on the engineer working. Furthermore, frequent changes to drawings are not always managed and recorded correctly in real time.
Since all of these aspects compromise quality, it makes sense to use a software-controlled planning system. In such a system, manufacturers can use a scripting language to specify rules that define production schedules, such as detailing which steps are to be performed mechanically, which are dependent on the respective machine, and which production steps are to be performed manually or semi-automatically. These rules must be flexible so that adjustments can be made. For example, they might look like this:
Use standard machine if single wire and 0.35m㎡< cross section < 6m㎡
Based on these rules, the system reads the automaker's drawings, analyzes them, and then generates production data, including work plans and parts lists. In addition to the considerable savings in working time, the quality advantage is also high due to the elimination of manual sources of failure and the standardization of implementation procedures. Such software can also calculate production documents based on specific on-time delivery schedules. The appropriate harnesses are then produced in one batch for a specific vehicle and delivered just in time.
Below the ERP layer, the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is tasked with controlling and documenting the production of automotive wiring harnesses. However, due to many specific aspects of wire harness production, general MES systems cannot be used. For example, they cannot fail in the IT technical description of the harness. Therefore, different wire harness manufacturers have developed their own MES systems. However, when production processes or ERP systems change, these customized software solutions are no longer suitable. Another problem is that know-how is often undocumented and tied to a specific employee. For this reason, leading manufacturers of automotive wiring harnesses rely on systems developed specifically for the wiring harness industry.