Production process and

Initial situation and motivation

The production of the wire harness is the core process of the assemblers. The Wire Harness and most of the individual processes are specified by the Tier1/2 or OEMs. Wire harness production today is based on a high proportion of manual value creation, with all the corresponding consequences. Due to the variety and complexity of parts and the cheap availability of labor in the best-cost countries of the regions, this manual production is still economical.

The core area of production is the so-called construction board, which is optimized to meet the requirements of manual production. It provides employees on the production lines with important information about the routing of cables and components such as connectors, clips and brackets by means of colors, cross-sections and other aids to ensure that production is as error-free as possible despite the high level of complexity and almost unmanageable number of variants. Due to influencing factors such as traceability for safety-relevant parts or increasing complexity, this production principle is reaching its limits. In addition, employees who can master this level of complexity are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Automation of production is the most promising approach to meet these challenges. To this end, production equipment, components and processes must be examined and adapted to support the traceability and automation of the production process.

Current focus of work

Sub-project 6 focuses on analyzing the production process and the production equipment used (today). Since the competitive differentiation of wire harness production nowadays mainly takes place via the interlinking and execution of the production sequence and means, the so-called Bill Of Process (BOP), and these cannot be discussed internally and therefore pre-competitively, a generally valid process flow of wire harness production from the demonstrator of SP 08 was used and now serves as the basis for this analysis.

The following fields of action (work packages) have been identified for SP 06 and are currently being processed:

• Analysis of commonalities with the other sub-projects
• Evaluation of the current Wire Harness and its opportunities for automation
• Recommendations for the various stages of the value chain in the form of a categorization of barriers to automation

Outlook

The vision of defining a completely automated manufacturing process for wire harness production, from the receipt of raw materials to the delivery of the end product, is supported by this sub-project: the knowledge gained in SP6 will result in further work packages, which will be defined in sub-projects 1, 2 and 3 in the form of additional design guidelines for avoiding or circumventing automation obstacles and incorporated into the emerging DIN 72036 standard. Furthermore, a kind of "innovation stock" is created for tasks still to be solved on the production equipment side, which for pre-competitive reasons cannot be defined within the framework of the sub-project, but which flows back to the participants as valuable input.