We recently conducted a Webinar on the traditional wire harness design process vs. applying the practical approach of using Arcadia. in case you missed it, check out this breakdown of what we covered. 

1. Limitations of a Traditional Wire Harness Design Process

Due to manual synchronisation between drawing cut lists, manufacturing documentation, and shop floor design, maintaining consistency becomes challenging. Issues often arise, particularly when designers update design schematics.

Another issue we typically see: wire length adjustment in a manual method is quite often done on the circuit board itself. Designers must follow the entire process of drawing the circuit design, creating the cut list, and making a form board drawing on the shop floor. Only after this, the final wire length adjustment is done manually, measured, and then fed back to the cut strip termination machines.

The availability of electronic components is often not known until later in the design process. It’s very rare for an electrical designer with a manual method to even get a detailed bill of materials.

With these problems, you risk ending up with quoting errors – errors that could result in (1) losing a bid for a harness manufacturing contract or (2) getting a contract where you’ve underpriced parts or electrical components that were miss-specified or missing in the original assumptions that were done manually.

With Arcadia’s cloud-based ECAD tool, everything is automatic and repeatable for your wire harness designs.

2. The Power of a Modern Wire Harness Design and Manufacturing Suite

Key highlight: Effort to update design and manufacturing documentation using a modern tool and software: typically less than 25% of that for manual processes. 

With a digital mechanical wire harness design and manufacturing suite, quoting and designing a harness to a manufacturing-ready standard is far more efficient and accurate versus manual methods.

This essentially gives you a headstart over anyone working manually – and you’re having to do far less work, even though you’re effectively redrawing the customer’s input.  

Quotes don’t only include the bill of materials. Arcadia’s software tools and modules allow you to do labour quotes. You can also see how much revisions would cost with delta quotes. 

Working digitally, you can streamline the data management process. Whether that’s a purchase or MRP system, our API capabilities can integrate with a number of the components of those different electronic systems. All of those manual processes you’re used to battling through, gone – replaced by automated processes that do the heavy work for you.  

When you create a wire harness design you can:

• Synchronously and automatically update printed circuit boards and all of your drawings and documentation to incorporate the changes

Even with a manufacturing form board, changes may only apply to a certain area of it. 

• Arcadia’s digital ECAD tools can also identify where the form board layout has changed.
• Can print out sections that only go to replace those parts of the form board for minimum tooling disruption.

The bottom line: Implementing digital tools saves labour, enables productivity gains, and ensures accurate and efficient design and manufacturing processes.

3. ECAD Software Practical Demonstrations

Find out for yourself how easy digital tools can make your job. You can watch a practical demonstration now, which includes:

• Using legacy spreadsheet data to build your own ECAD database
• Leveraging CSV data to generate your harness
• Using your legacy or customer prints effectively
• Formboard layouts for effective manufacturing
• Generating documentation such as BOM table, wire cut list, cirris reports and connector reports

Watch the full webinar now

Prefer a personal demonstration? To see how you improve your efficiency and productivity, just ask for a free demonstration. We can even offer a seven-day free trial too – it’s easy to give our solutions a spin because they work in the cloud. If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help.