Fast and accurate wire harness cost estimation

To maximize profitability, harness manufacturers must competitively price their products, but to do so entails working through tight timescales and evolving variables like copper prices. To conquer this developmental uncertainty and drive down wire harness cost estimations, manufacturers should implement a purpose-built, cloud-based solution that automates the costing regime and delivers accurate financial figures in minutes. Discover what costing tools can digitally transform your processes for the better by accessing our whitepaper.

Technical challenges affect both cost and costing of wire harness

Wire harnesses are made of numerous and diverse parts, in turn generating layers of data complexity that obfuscate costing estimations. To complicate matters, profit margins on industrial wiring harnessing are slim, creating a “get it right the first time” mentality since miscalculations cut directly into the bottom line. Fortunately, costing tools that account for all these variables are readily available. A cloud-based solution that considers internal system demands alongside external market pressures can produce accurate wire harness cost estimations, helping manufacturers optimize their processes for profitability.

Three costing tool approaches to wire harness costing

To automate harness costing, manufacturers can use one of three approaches:

• In-house: This solution is created by internal teams who use data sources, costing, price elements and engineering data descriptions to produce a costing tool. The resulting product is a completely custom solution with high up-front development costs and a heavy ongoing maintenance burden.
• Standard-compliant: This solution is either built in-house or comes as a deviation of a commercial off-the-shelf provider. It is built around company experiences and incorporates “standardized” elements. The resulting product has high IT maintenance and programming costs.
• Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS): This solution comes from a provider and offers an innate advantage in that it’s designed, tested, supported and built on industry best practices. Costing capabilities vary between COTS vendors but choosing a solution that offers wire harness cost estimations is a necessity in today’s complex market.

Harness costing in minutes

Wire harness manufacturers need timely costing details to produce accurate wire harness cost estimations. To gain timely financial information, an automated costing tool is key: as a design and its associated inputs evolve, so too will the cost estimation as it dynamically updates to keep pace with any changes. An automated costing tool, therefore, eliminates any misquotes or errors, helping manufacturers maintain and even increase profitability.