Today, the wiring harness in a vehicle is one of the last components that is predominantly manufactured manually, i.e., by hand. Due to the complexity and extreme variety (several million possibilities), this leads to the need for "mass production in batch size one" – each wiring harness is unique. This type of production is currently only technically and economically feasible with a large proportion of manual labor. This requires countries that can provide sufficient labor for these production activities despite low wage levels. Due to numerous influencing factors such as autonomous driving, increasing safety, comfort, and communication features, electrification of the powertrain, etc., the complexity of the wiring harness continues to increase. In combination with the miniaturization of components such as connectors and increasing documentation and traceability requirements in production, the limitations of manual production of the wiring harness are highlighted.

The automation of wiring harness production has the potential to address these challenges. Currently, wiring harness automation is theoretically technically feasible, but too expensive due to the large number of different components (each component requires its own tools) and the size and complexity of the product. At the same time, the lack of appropriate standards is hampering technological development toward automation. The key to automation is therefore overarching standards, along which the wiring harness can be reduced to an automatable level of complexity through modularization, thus leading to interoperable wiring harness production.