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Board builds have, for a long time, been fairly straightforward. The old tools of plywood and nail layouts, and the like, have been the standards in the field. But Panduit, whose focus is on wire management solutions for those who build wire harnesses, may be ready to fundamentally change the nature of things with its new Quick-Build Harness Board System.

Quick-Build is a major new change in the field of wire harness building, and it employs a series of tiles measuring one foot by one foot. Each of the titles has a set of holes in it that allow accessories to be added to the tiles proper and then repositioned as needed. Mounting pegs lock into grid tiles with a simple twist, and when used alongside Quick-Build mounting platforms and nail holders, the end result becomes a complete modular harness board that has plenty of useful options contained therein. With harness routing elevated to above grid tiles, the Panduit Automatic Cable Tie system becomes usable, and that is on average six times faster than conventional systems, yielding greatly sped-up build times. It also becomes possible to re-use many currently in place Panduit harness board accessories, making for a highly modular and efficient system.

This isn't just a matter of convenience, either, but rather a matter of savings. Wire harness build time was reportedly improved as much as 18 percent against the plywood board method, which is almost a full fifth off. Better yet, as explained by Panduit OEM Solutions vice president Bob Krisel, there are huge drops in material costs and the like. Materials costs drop roughly 65 percent, and since there's no longer a need to store a lot of plywood boards—which are a huge part of the package—there's a likewise drop in storage costs, over 50 percent of the total down.

The advantages to such a system are huge; storage costs fall, labor costs fall, setup times drop, and all this taken together means one of two critical points. For the truly budget minded, it becomes possible to run a fairly minimal operation with a handful of points only open for a few hours a week. For the expansion minded, meanwhile, it becomes possible to do a whole lot more with the same amount, and any increases from there should yield much better results overall. It's great to see a new system comes out that represents such a boost in efficiency over its predecessors, and it's also likely to prove a big draw for those in the wire harness field that want improved operations.

Sometimes the simplest things can be the catalysts of major savings, and in this case, Panduit seems to have just such a thing on tap. With big time savings, storage cost savings, material savings and more afoot, Panduit may have a very successful enterprise ready to go as companies look to take advantage of all these savings in current operations.