North Eastern Company (NE Company)* works in both the PCB assembly and wire harness manufacturing industries.  They have been able to successfully utilize their ERP system for production of PCB assemblies and material control for both PCB assembly and wire harness manufacturing.  However, they have had to do all production control for wire harnesses outside of the system.

Manufacturing wire harnesses is a little like an EMS company making the components and then placing them on the PCB. Not only do the manufacturers have to worry about customer specifications and drawings, but they have to manage fluctuations in commodity prices (copper) and build each piece that goes into the final assembly.

On a simplified level, these wires may as well be individual subassemblies. Each wire can differ in gauge, weight, color, stranding, shielding, cut length, etc. Each end of the wire may have different strip lengths, treatments, and terminations. This level of detail almost requires individual subassemblies. However, complex harnesses may have hundreds or thousands of individual wires. This makes it impractical to create and manage a subassembly for each individual wire, especially if those wires change often

They are looking for a simple method to provide visibility of the material used, steps required to complete production, and individual wire configurations.  So far, they have been unsuccessful at integrating this into their system.  Their current approach is to use the ERP to handle the raw material stream and attach, create, distribute, and process all harness instructions outside the system using Excel and other applications.

How can NE Company more completely integrate this into the system?  Is there any way for them to eliminate the external applications all together?  Can they at least reduce the external processing?  What type of controls can be built in to the system to reduce human error and increase efficiency?

*Name has been changed