The wiring harness design process — written out, end to end.

A wiring harness design is not one document. It is a stack — schematic, routing, 3D model, bill of materials, spec sheet, formboard layout, test plan — and every one of those documents needs to agree with every other one. If the routing changes, the BOM changes. If a connector is swapped, the spec changes. If a branch is rerouted, the test plan changes.

The conventional answer to this is a small team of harness engineers, a spreadsheet of wire lists, a 2D CAD package, a separate 3D CAD package, and a lot of evenings spent reconciling the two. The result is a design pack that arrives weeks late and disagrees with itself in three places.

We built our own software to attack exactly that problem. One data layer underneath the schematic, the routing, the BOM and the spec. Change the schematic, the BOM updates. Reroute a branch in 3D, the wire-length column in the BOM updates. Generate a spec sheet, it comes out aligned to the routing and to the BOM by construction, not by manual cross-check.

That single data-layer architecture is the wedge. It is what lets us quote a full harness design programme in days where the conventional workflow would quote it in weeks. The rest of the story is about how that data layer touches the conventional CAD packages your supply chain already runs on.

The CAD packages we work in

We are deliberately tool-flexible. The harness design world fragments across a handful of commercial CAD ecosystems and a tail of in-house systems, and a useful consultancy has to meet customers where they already are.

• Capital (Siemens / Mentor) — full schematic, 3D harness routing, manufacturability checks. The dominant Tier-1 automotive stack.
• HarnessBuilder (e3.series) — schematic plus board, popular in off-highway and industrial.
• Cloud-based harness CAD — modern web-native tools used by teams that need real-time collaboration and quoting integration.
• Vehicle CAD — Catia, NX, Creo, SolidWorks for the chassis or vehicle model that the harness routes against.
• Our bespoke layer — runs alongside the customer's chosen CAD, adds the single-source data layer, the rapid quoting, and the BOM / spec / test generators.

If your stack is none of the above — Creo Schematics, a KBL exchange pipeline, an in-house EDS export format — say so on the first call. We will tell you straight how cleanly the integration will work before any clock starts.

What "manufacturability-checked" means in practice

Every harness we design is checked against three layers of manufacturability rules before it leaves us:

• Geometric — minimum bend radii honoured, branch breakout angles within machine tolerances, sealing surfaces clear, splice positions in accessible zones.
• Bill of materials — every part number resolved to a supplier and stocking status, lead-time flags surfaced before they bite, single-source risks flagged for the BOM review.
• Process — formboard layout achievable on the customer's manufacturer's actual board sizes, splice equipment in scope, test fixture requirements documented up front.

These checks run continuously through the routing pass, not once at the end. A design that has been through this workflow does not come back with a list of "the factory says it cannot build this" findings after handover. That is the whole point.