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Zuken announced Harness Builder 2027 for E3.series, adding Dashboard to give manufacturing teams a shared view of wire harness production progress. The release also expands capabilities in estimating, table management, and component modeling for wire harness design and manufacturing.
Harness Builder is purpose-built software for wire harness design, estimating, and manufacturing documentation. The 2027 release advances Zuken’s Connected Manufacturing initiative by connecting production data from Assembly Task Manager with Dashboard, giving supervisors, production managers, and shop-floor technicians greater visibility into active builds and production status.
Production Progress Tracking with Dashboard
Zuken adds Dashboard to Harness Builder, bringing wire harness production tracking into the digital assembly workflow. As technicians mark tasks complete in Assembly Task Manager, build progress updates in Dashboard. Supervisors, production managers, and shop-floor technicians can use the shared view to monitor active projects and builds.
The Active Builds overview displays progress charts and tracking data for high-level analysis or shop-floor monitoring. The single-build view shows start and target completion dates, technician information, detailed progress charts, and timestamps for every task. Together, the two views support both at-a-glance monitoring and detailed build analysis.
Assembly Task Manager Connects Work Instructions to Production Tracking
Assembly Task Manager provides the digital work instruction component of Zuken’s Connected Manufacturing workflow. It creates work instructions from engineering designs and presents them digitally to production technicians.
Assembly Task Manager stores task instructions containing text, images, videos, and links in a reusable library. The tool automatically identifies the necessary tasks based on the harness design’s parts list and organizes them into a proposed workflow order. Production engineers finalize the work package by reviewing and sequencing the tasks.
On the shop floor, technicians work through the assigned tasks one at a time. Each task provides detailed instructions and supporting media, along with a digital representation of the harness. As technicians mark tasks as complete, Assembly Task Manager records progress and provides the production data displayed in the Dashboard.
“Harness Builder connects the engineering definition of a harness with the information used to plan and track its production,” said Paul Harvell, vice president of engineering at Zuken USA. “Engineers can prepare tasks and manufacturing outputs within the design workflow, while production teams can follow the work and view build status from the same source data.”
More Control Over Estimates and Manufacturing Tables
Harness Builder expands its Online Cost Estimator tool to support quantity-based estimating and subproject-level estimates for individual harnesses within complex, multi-harness designs. The tool now incorporates bulk pricing into its live price data, accounting for price breaks at higher order quantities.
New table-management controls apply to bills of materials (BOMs), wire run lists (WRLs), and splice tables. Multi-tier sorting organizes tables by a hierarchy of attributes, giving engineers greater control over manufacturing documentation. In addition, the synchronous update capability can now refresh every table across multiple sheets with a single command.
Expanded Support for Connectors with Inserts and Cable Protection
Common harness components, such as connectors with inserts and cable protection, require specialized modeling to represent their physical construction. Harness Builder adds configurable support for connectors with inserts in documentation tables. BOM and WRL tables can now display all three levels of a connector-with-inserts hierarchy: the housing, its inserts, and the pin terminals connected to each insert.
Cable protection includes tubing, loom, sleeving, and overbraid. The Cable Protection utility can now model these coverings as a single continuous segment across a splice rather than as separate components on each side. This structure more closely reflects the physical assembly, improves length calculations, and reduces unnecessary entries in the device list.
