Where should production be streamlined? Komax has given some thought to this. A logical place to start is with production times, given that there is still a lot of manual work involved in panel building. According to a study by the University of Stuttgart, 49% of all working hours are spent on wiring: for each wire, on average, 67 seconds are spent reading and analyzing the diagram, 157 seconds spent cutting, stripping, crimping and marking, and 42 seconds spent laying the wire. That’s a total of 266 seconds, or around four and a half minutes. With typically 500 wires per control cabinet, this can easily add up to a whole working week.

Automation can be outsourced

As a manufacturer of state-of-the-art, fully automatic wire processing machines, we know that an enormous amount of working time can be saved in the most complex step – wire production. But very few control cabinet manufacturers are able to utilize such machines sufficiently and therefore operate them efficiently. But what if the most complex processes in wire production could be outsourced? Services like this already exist. Here we present the service provided by our customer WusTec, based in Dunningen-Seedorf in Baden-Württemberg.

Clever software as interface 

To make outsourcing easier for its customers, WusTec has developed a clever software called Wiremaster. This allows the control cabinet manufacturer to enter all relevant data for the wires required or transfer it from their ECAD system. WusTec needs data for the production of both wire ends, the cross section and color of the wire, wire length and for labeling both wire ends. That’s all.

The data now goes directly to our fully automatic wire processing machines, the most advanced on the market today. Specifically the Zeta and Alpha machines are designed to meet the special requirements of industrial/control cabinet manufacture. Within seconds they produce what takes almost three minutes in manual labor.

Delivery in two to three days

Komax systems process wires of various cross sections largely without any time spent on changeovers. Automatic feeding from the wire store is followed by cutting to length, stripping and crimping of the connection. There is also wire marking, with the machine printing the start and end points legibly. Finally, it bundles the wires in the order specified by the customer. They are then ready for delivery. The control cabinet manufacturer usually receives the finished wires two to three days after the order is placed.

Time savings of up to 80% for wiring

Thanks to this interface, the control cabinet manufacturer can use software to generate the perfect wire bundles for their assembly. Or they can have their wires bundled in the ideal wiring order for installation. This allows the wirer to take each wire as needed and see directly which components it is to be connected to. This also eliminates the time required for labeling the wires. Thus the greatest barrier to an efficient process is removed: time spent searching for the right wire, reading the wiring diagram, changing tools, accidentally wiring incorrectly, etc.

Also for large wire cross sections 

All this also works with increasingly large wire cross sections, which requires special technical infrastructure to fabricate. WusTec compresses cables up to 25 mm2 using a fully automatic ultrasonic welding method. The result is a uniquely robust and metallurgically pure connection that ensures minimal contact resistance on a long-term basis.

Fully automated wire fabrication offers considerable potential for increasing efficiency in the most labor-intensive area of control system and switchgear construction. Compared to manual fabrication, our automatic machines reduce the time required to a mere fraction.

Division of labor as a recipe for success

The success of this outsourcing solution shows that the demand for finished wires is significant. This is because they are in large part still made by hand, especially by smaller control cabinet manufacturers. Even small batch sizes can therefore be profitable. This sensible division of labor between the control cabinet manufacturer and the wire producer creates a clear win-win situation. The former can reduce its input enormously, and the latter can utilize its machinery even better.

This promising business model rests on two pillars: software geared to the needs of a specific target group plus state-of-the-art innovations from Komax. On our side, we are doing our utmost to further improve market performance for control cabinet manufacturers.

Reading circuit diagrams is a thing of the past

Zeta 640