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  2. What is Wire Harnessing?

What is a Wire Harness?

A wire harness connects all the elements of an electrical system, including the cables, wires, and parts that connect the electrical components of the product or system to distribute electrical power. Planning out your wire harnessing is imperative. A well-designed wire harness ensures that your systems assemble easily, thus eliminating wasted materials and saving time and money.

Wire harness assemblies are found across use cases with varying complexity depending on the industry or product category in which they’re applied. Any product that contains an electrical system likely uses wire harnesses. These products could be something as small as a mini fridge, or something as large as an industrial machine. Regardless of the application, wire harness design helps eliminate friction throughout the design process and helps ensure a safer and more efficient system.

 

Can You Design Wire Harnesses in Both 2D and 3D?

Yes! Wire harnesses can be designed using both 2D and 3D design software. Schematic tools, like SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic, can be used as a first step for your logical wire harness design, helping you map out each connector and wire relationship clearly. A simple 2D layout sketch can help put you and your team on the same page when trying to understand and think through the overall connectivity of the system’s components. 2D wire harness design is the traditional method of laying out harnesses; however, it requires various manual methods and physical prototypes to determine wire lengths and branching locations. Today’s 3D design capabilities offer greater accuracy and flexibility in visualization and design, while reducing physical prototyping.

After creating your initial logical harness layout in 2D, using a 3D design tool opens the door to a range of exclusive benefits. With a 3D CAD modeling tool, you can take your schematic and translate it into 3D, plan the harness path, and then visualize how your wire harness will actually fit into a product. Being able to virtualize these steps is key to reducing the number of costly prototypes needed, and also reveals areas to improve the assembly and serviceability of your design, with benefits including optimizing the use of wire or cable–something which is not easily visible in a 2D model alone.

The Design Process - From Design to Manufacturing

No product is created in a silo. Each project requires collaboration between a range of teams. Let’s take a look at the steps you may take to bring a wire harness from design to manufacturing.

The Design Process - From Design to Manufacturing
  1. Schematic Design
    Ensure all teams are aligned at the start of your project by generating 2D schematic designs to provide a system-level overview of all components, individual wires, and harnesses. 
  2. 3D Design and Visualization
    Plan accurate 3D routing paths, add necessary accessories, and determine wire lengths before making a single physical prototype, saving time, money, and resources.
  3. Documentation
    Generate product and manufacturing documentation, including wire and cable assemblies, form board drawing, bill of materials (BOM), and reports to then send all the necessary files to the production and manufacturing team.
  4. Manufacturing
    Begin the production and wire harness manufacturing process, which includes building form board tooling and programming wire cutting machines, all powered by the clear documentation created during the design phase of the project.
Interested? Check out the SOLIDWORKS Electrical wire harness design tools View Products

Who is Involved in Wire Harnessing?

Let’s explore some of the key players who create wire harness designs.

Wiring Harness Design Engineer / Systems Integrator

Wiring Harness Design Engineer / Systems Integrator

 

Wiring harness design engineers and systems integrators are responsible for the design, management, and creation of wire and cable harnesses according to details specifications across a range of products and systems. This includes tasks such as component selection, voltage architecture, and the development of electrical schematics and related documentation to manage complex wiring. Usually, these wire harness engineering roles either fall under an organization’s electromechanical or electrical team.

Wiring harness design engineers and systems integrators serve a key role in facilitating the collaboration between electrical and mechanical teams as designing a strong wire harness requires a complete understanding of both the electrical and mechanical components of a design. Additionally, wiring harness design engineers are often required to create and understand both 2D and 3D designs/models.

Electrical Engineer

 

Electrical engineers may also share many of the same responsibilities as a wiring harness design engineer. Depending upon the size of your company, an electrical engineer may be responsible for a range of tasks, including wire harness design. An electrical engineer working on wire harnessing would carry out many of the same tasks as a wiring harness design engineer including everything from system design to voltage management to component selection and documentation. 

Regardless of title, wire harness design is an integral step in the overall electromechanical design and engineering processes. A skilled wire harness design can save time and money, and ultimately help ensure a safer and more efficient system.

Where is Wire Harnessing Used?

Almost every industry utilizes electrical components and equipment typically requiring electrical harnesses. Below are just some of these industries employing such electrical systems.

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Our Solutions for Wire Harnessing

SOLIDWORKS offers a range of wire harness design tools in its SOLIDWORKS Electrical portfolio. Let’s take a look.

Let’s Dive Deeper

Wire harness design has wide reaching applications spanning industries, use cases, and job titles. Below, we’ve collected some of our favorite resources that dive deeper into wire harness design and its related applications to help you learn more.