Complicating matters is the disconnect between harness design and manufacturing departments and systems. Often, design and manufacturing engineers manually transfer data between their respective domains, recreating and re-entering design data translated into their respective systems, such as CAD, production, assembly board design, or costing systems.
Under the weight of these new challenges, traditional wiring harness manufacturing methods are starting to look unsustainable. First, the disconnect between the design and manufacturing processes resulted in the need to manually transfer and re-enter data between domains. This is not only slow and error-prone, but also makes it difficult to use engineers’ time and energy efficiently. When manufacturing engineers make changes to improve the manufacturability of the wiring harness, those changes are often lost in data translations between teams. Even in state-of-the-art facilities, high-level processes from design engineering to product engineering, manufacturing engineering and generating manufacturing documentation are accomplished with Microsoft Office applications and AutoCAD drawings