Analogy's SaberHarness to Cut Costs and Improve Wire Harness Design Process For Scania
13 December 1999
Analogy's SaberHarness to Cut Costs and Improve Wire Harness Design Process For Scania
Scania Switches From In-House Tools to Analogy's 'Concept-to-Manufacture'
Solution
BEAVERTON, Ore., Dec. 10 -- Scania, one of the world's
leading manufacturers of heavy trucks and buses, is switching from an
internally developed wire/cable harness design tool to Analogy's
SaberHarness solution -- which is being adopted rapidly by the
automotive industry.
The SaberHarness suite offers Scania a complete "concept-to-manufacture"
solution, transforming the harness design process from one that is purely
mechanical to one that includes electrical analysis prior to manufacture.
"Standardizing on SaberHarness means we can eliminate the ongoing overhead and
maintenance costs we were encountering with our in-house harness design
system," said Anna Limell, a project leader with Scania and responsible for
the company's use of the CATIA design environment world-wide.
Limell heads up the company's ELCAD (ELectrical Computer Aided Design)
project, which aims to deliver a high tech design environment to all its
designers during the course of next year. Scania standardized on CATIA in the
mid-80s for its design entry requirements and, working with a software
consultancy, designed an in-house tool for cable harness design in 1992. This
in-house tool, called Scanel, produces schematics, full wiring diagrams and
cable harness printouts.
Because the in-house tool had been developed for and by Scania
specifically, it was necessary to upgrade and revise Scanel when new releases
of CATIA were installed. "This 'keeping pace' with CATIA carried significant
time and cost penalties, because we had to keep calling in the consultants,"
said Limell, adding that the maintenance and servicing of the in-house tool
has been costing Scania around $100,000 per annum.
As part of Scania's ELCAD project, the company will be standardizing on
CATIA E3D which will enable its designers to route cables, in 3D, around the
vehicles it is designing. Its in-house tool, now quite old, has no interface
to CATIA E3D and the cost of creating one is seen as prohibitive.
To this end, Scania has invested in 15 SaberHarness licenses.
"SaberHarness has very good interfaces with other tools, including CATIA E3D,"
continued Limell. "In addition, we will have the ability to simulate the cable
harnesses prior to manufacture to ensure they meet in-house and industry
recognized standards and specs. We start using SaberHarness in February of
next year and expect to see a return on our investment sometime in 2001."
Limell went on to say that using SaberHarness, in conjunction with CATIA E3D,
means the company can cut the time it takes to develop cable harnesses by
around 30%. Longer term savings can be realized, says Limell, through
aftersales having access to the Saber diagrams which can then be modified and
printed -- as opposed to generated from scratch, as is the case now.
SaberHarness provides fully integrated mixed-technology simulation for
wire harness analysis, including thermal, electrical and EMC effects, and will
manage the increasing complexity of electronic content in Scania's automotive
vehicles. The tool's compatibility with industry-standard 3D CAD software,
such as CATIA and Pro/ENGINEER, has proved instrumental in Scania's selection
of SaberHarness and the widespread use of Saber design tools throughout the
automotive industry, were key factors in the company's decision to switch to
SaberHarness.
In addition, an extensible user interface (which uses the Tcl/Tk standard
language) will enable the company to add easily its own menus and link in its
own tools. SaberHarness is also operational on both Unix and NT platforms.
These features have given Scania the ability to undertake "collaborative
engineering" projects with data more freely shared, distributed and exchanged
between designers and suppliers.
A single database of operation means that any changes in wiring diagrams,
for example, are automatically reflected through the system to the dedicated
SaberBundle harness layout tool. This includes support for bundle geometry
information, dimensioning, manufacturing tables and export to sub-contractor
systems. Variations of harness configurations are managed throughout the
design, manufacturing, service and documentation structures, delivering
greater freedom in creating and managing all engineering information, for
example components, wire definitions, tables and connectors.
"Essentially, we wanted to replace our in-house Scanel with a standard
tool that has a fully-functional, bi-directional interface to the CATIA E3D
mechanical layout system. Furthermore, we wanted a tool that would enable us
to limit the number of adaptations we have to make when other tools are
upgraded. SaberHarness fulfils the majority of our complex cable harness
design requirements," concluded Limell.