Service Electric Supply, Inc. (SES) is a company that builds custom wire harnesses for various industries. A crucial part of their manufacturing process is wire processing, which involves cutting and stripping wire. This process was labor-intensive and required significant manual effort. SES approached us to help streamline this process and improve efficiency.

We began by installing a new wire processing machine, the Schleuniger PowerStrip 9500. This machine is capable of cutting and stripping wire in a single pass, which significantly reduced the labor required for wire processing.

However, the Schleuniger PowerStrip 9500 had to be programmed before each use, which became a bottleneck in the process. To simplify programming, we implemented the Cayman wire processing software. This software runs on a PC and communicates with the Schleuniger PowerStrip 9500 via its data port. With Cayman, we were able to create a wire processing library containing the settings for all their wire processing needs.

To further streamline the process, we developed a custom program in Synergy DBL to create Cayman instruction files for each job. These instruction files contained the cut, strip, and quantity information for each wire listed in the bill of material.

With these improvements, the operator only needed to open a Cayman instruction file and load the wire when prompted. The Schleuniger PowerStrip 9500 would then cut and strip the wire in a single pass, reducing labor by an estimated 90%.

In summary, we were able to solve SES's problem of labor-intensive wire processing by implementing a new wire processing machine and streamlining the programming process with the Cayman software and custom Synergy/DE program. These improvements significantly increased efficiency and reduced the labor required for wire processing.