“We want to build supply chain resilience through automation”

With Christian Infanger, Director Product Group Harness Assembly at Komax, we talk to a seasoned expert who has been shaping the automation of wire harness production for many years. Before joining Komax, he spent over a decade at Siemens, where he focused on market intelligence and technology evaluation – experience that sharpened his view on how innovation and competitiveness can go hand in hand.

At the AWH Conference in Detroit, he will share insights into how automation and one-piece flow approaches can reshape the industry, helping manufacturers adapt to rising product complexity and tighter market demands. Ahead of his talk, we sat down with him to discuss the challenges and opportunities in making harness production more efficient, flexible, and future-ready.

ADT: We are in the midst of a dynamic and disruptive decade for the automotive industry. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges the wire harness sector will face over the next five years?

Automotive Wire Harness North America

20-21 October 2025 | The Henry Hotel, Dearborn, Michigan

Infanger: Cost is certainly a topic that needs to be managed carefully. Raw material prices, wage inflation, emergency deliveries, but also hidden quality costs and production inefficiencies add up very quickly. There is also a huge urgency to reinvent manufacturing processes as manual work reaches its limits. The ever-increasing range of functionality adds content to the wire harness. This clashes with packaging constraints and fuels miniaturization of components. Our ambition is to build supply chain resilience through automation, establishing a seamless production flow that yields substantial efficiency gains.

Komax has long been a key enabler of automation in wiring harness production. How is your team currently helping customers transition from manual to automated processes – especially in the face of rising product complexity and shifting market demands?

We established strong ties with major players in our industry. Gathering knowledge from multiple domains is paramount to mastering product complexity and automation challenges. This allows us to support our customers throughout the entire journey from component engineering, harness design, production planning, ramp-up, start of production and beyond. Komax Group is a trusted partner across all stages of the value chain, not limiting itself to being a pure-play equipment manufacturer. Indeed, taking a holistic view is critically important to excel in a fast-paced production environment.

Your talk at the Automotive Wire Harness & EDS Conference 2025 introduces a paradigm shift in harness manufacturing, emphasizing the move from manual final assembly toward automated pre-assembly. What are the key benefits of this modular approach, and how can manufacturers ensure scalability and adaptability across platforms and volumes?

Today’s final assembly is labor intensive and error prone. Given the complexity of an entire body harness, the level of automation is almost zero. We propose leveraging advanced technology in the pre-assembly area to manufacture autarkic harnesses and sub-modules of e.g., body harness in a highly automated fashion. That includes cutting, crimping, twisting, pinning… all the way down to taping and clip assembly. Following a one-piece flow approach, seamless handover and automatic routing plays a pivotal role. It reduces handling effort, requires less intermediate storage, adopts much faster to design changes, yields higher throughput and allows for a certain reduction in end-of-line testing. The entire production system consists of few core elements – flexible and highly scalable – so that customers can adjust their production concept to demand fluctuations or reuse equipment in different projects.

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