Zuken’s New Release Introduces Enhancements to Accelerate the Adoption of Smart Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Harness Builder for E3.series 2022 introduces enhancements to accelerate the adoption of smart manufacturing, improve wire harness cost and weight estimates, and connect to leading third-party testing and manufacturing solutions. New cost and weight estimation options significantly improve upfront engineering quality.

Combined with updates to the Work Instructions Assistant and the powerful dash number configuration, the new features eliminate manufacturing and assembly overheads. In the 2022 release, partner integrations are expanding to new areas. Simultaneously the release further develops existing technology partnerships to provide a holistic design and manufacturing solution. The expanded wire harness testing and manufacturing options cover most leading automated solutions.

“We made significant strides in this release towards the goal of smart manufacturing adoption. Harness Builder 2022 will improve our customer productivity through better automation, improved weight and cost estimation, and more third-party manufacturing solutions.”, comments Paul Harvell, Product Director of E3.series.

“The engineering savings are enormous with Harness Builder; a conservative estimate is anywhere between 25 to 50%. The savings on the production side is terrific, around threefold more than engineering. I would say Harness Builder for E3.series is a smart manufacturing tool and not just an engineering tool.” Brian Nash, Engineering Director ArcFlo.

Wire Harness Weight Estimator

Harness Builder for E3.series introduces the brand-new Wire Harness Weight Estimator to empower wire harness engineers to track the weight of a harness throughout the design cycle. There are many factors influencing the weight of a wire harness. The estimator considers the weight of wires, tubing, cable protection, and all harness components in a formboard drawing. Estimates include the weight of connector pins, coverings, seas, and other accessories to provide the most accurate estimate. The Wire Harness Weight Estimator includes multiple measuring units to handle a wide range of component and design types. 

Built-in Datasheet Viewer

Harness Builder for E3.series simplifies access to datasheets with an intelligent built-in viewer. Datasheets are often the primary source of accurate information about the components in a wire harness design. Wire harness engineers are constantly flipping between their design application, websites, PDF viewers, and other sources to access information to help with their designs. For instance, documentation for a simple connector includes multiple datasheets for housing, pins, boots, connector tools, and accessories. Upon selecting an item on the formboard drawing, the datasheet viewer displays information for all sub-parts of the selected component. The easy-to-use multi-tab viewer helps wire harness designers reduce the overhead of opening and tracking multiple datasheets.

Enhanced Wire Harness Quoting Tool

The wire harness quoting tool is a key benefit of the Harness Builder for E3.series solution. The quoting tool is driven by the logical connectivity, components, and physical layout and helps wire harness manufacturers estimate the loaded cost of producing a wire harness. The latest enhancements to the quoting tool provide a dedicated screen and dialog to better visualize the quote. Estimates are also more accurate with various improvements in time assignments for multiple tasks. In addition, the long lead items list helps designers identify the critical components to order early and avoid supply chain delays.

Loom Report

Cutting and fitting tubes, coverings, and other cable protection materials is a mandatory task in the wire harness assembly process. Often, designers measure and create a cut-list to pass to production; the process can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Harness Builder for E3.series now automatically produces a configurable loom cut-list from the formboard drawings. The configuration options enable the reports to show relevant information and manage the reporting template.

Automated Wire Processing Machines

Smart manufacturing is the key to gaining efficiencies and reducing timelines without losing product quality. Manual wire processing has many overheads, and an intelligent design paired with the latest automated wire processing machines has the potential to cut wiring overheads by more than 50%. The latest updates help further simplify automatic wire processing with new features and support for leading wire cut, mark, and strip machines. 

Harness Builder for E3.series 2022 is available now in North America.