Car wiring harness development time cut by 67%

Sumitomo Wiring Systems slash product development time by 67 % using a virtual visual assembly system in the design and manufacture of automotive wire harness assemblies.

Delmia, a Dassault Systemes company has announced that Sumitomo Wiring Systems.

(SWS), a leading wire harness manufacturer, has reduced product development cycles by using Delmia 's ENVISION and QUEST solutions to simulate the manual assembly of its products.

By implementing Delmia's digital manufacturing solutions and increasing collaboration with car manufacturers, SWS has decreased its overall development time by 67 percent.

In 1998, SWS launched its virtual Visual Assembling System (VAS), with Delmia 's ENVISION and QUEST at the core of the system, to facilitate concurrent engineering among design, production engineering, and manufacturing divisions.

A car's wire harness consists of approximately 4,000 parts, the assembly of which is done manually and difficult to optimize.

In the past, SWS used a physical mock up methodology to define, validate, and optimize the assembly process.

However, due to time and cost constraints, it was difficult to cover the entire production operation and integrate all design and production change requirements.

Today, the Virtual Assembly System at SWS helps the company condense development cycles, detect early assembly problems during development, and accelerate production ramp-up times.

VAS Development Group also conducts many virtual iterations of the company's wire harness development, including design, assembly, and production flow.

The SWS production engineering department utilizes ENVISION to check interferences between jigs and wires, validate wire harness assembly layouts while considering operators' workability, and check twists and lengths of wires where harnesses are built into vehicles.

Moreover, with QUEST, SWS optimizes line development by modeling the layout of the entire factory, and virtually simulating the production flow before the factory is built.

"Through several development projects using VAS Development Group, we clearly see the effectiveness of Delmia 's digital manufacturing solutions," said Koichi Sakakura, project leader for VAS Development Group in SWS's production, engineering, and development department.

"SWS intends to expand its concurrent engineering efforts by heavily using 3D data and strengthening collaboration between the design and production departments.

Moreover, this system enables employees to share and utilize knowledge more efficiently, and reinforces our strong relationships with car manufacturers." "The successful deployment of Delmia ENVISION and QUEST at SWS is a meaningful case study," said Bertrand Saint-Martin, president of Delmia Japan.

"Since wire harnesses at SWS are assembled manually, this process was not simulated with digital manufacturing tools.

This success story proves that Delmia 's solutions can now address a wider range of processes, enabling our customers to further decrease development cycles." About Sumitomo Wiring Systems - Sumitomo Wiring Systems (SWS), established in 1917, is a major manufacturer of wire harnesses for automobiles and for office equipment industries.

SWS's wire harness production for motor vehicles and office equipment accounted for 95 percent of its fiscal 1999 revenues; electric wire and cables, 5%.

The company has 31 consolidated subsidiaries, 15 in Japan, three each in Brazil and India, two each in Australia and China, and one each in Canada, Indonesia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States.

Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.

is the major shareholder with 52.5% share of issued stock.

About Delmia - Delmia Corp, a Dassault Systemes company (Nasdaq: DASTY, Euronext Paris: 13065, DSY.PA), is the leading provider of lean digital manufacturing solutions, focused mainly on software that can be used to streamline manufacturing processes.

Delmia serves industries where the optimization of manufacturing processes is critical, including automotive, aerospace, fabrication and assembly, electrical and electronics, consumer goods, plant, and shipbuilding sectors.

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