Snapshot: Digitalizing your wire harness business
The following is a snapshot of the white paper “Digitalizing your wire harness business: Enhancing competitiveness by leveraging a digital twin and closed loop to achieve continual optimization”. If you like what you read, you can find out more about this topic here.
Siemens Digital Industries Software understands that conventional wire harness design and manufacturing methods are starting to bend under the weight of the product complexity caused by automotive industry trends. The need to ensure availability of consistent data and its seamless exchange
between stakeholders is critical, but this can be a tricky job, especially with traditional siloed domains and disjointed engineering and manufacturing systems (figure 1). This impacts the overall productivity of stakeholders. Manual reentry of data leads to error-prone and incoherent data throughout the flow, directly impacting product quality, and such mistakes cost money. This inadequacy also leads to longer cycle times and poses a serious challenge when it comes to creating budgets. If that is the case with a first-time design, imagine how overwhelming change management can be with today’s typical frequency of incoming changes.
Figure 1. Key challenges – disjointed manufacturing and engineering systems.
In a competitive industry like the wire harness business, manufacturing efficiency is paramount as it can erode the bottom line. Traditional practices like prototyping and physical tryouts can be time-consuming, unsustainable and unprofitable. The accelerating pace of program milestones also means that engineers have little time to optimize the manufacturing process, leading to a suboptimal process. Consequently, optimization efforts continue even after production has begun and can be even more challenging to optimize while ramping up. Tackling the challenges while remaining profitable calls for a business transformation.
But how? The answer lies in digitalization.
Digitalizing the wire harness business is no longer a question of should we, it is more a question of how fast can we do it? This is where the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services can help.
MORE RESOURCES:
Capital Harness Design Solutions→ Wiring harness design and engineering
Capital Harness Manufacturing Solutions→ Wiring harness manufacturing
Read the White Paper→ Digitalizing the wire harness business
