Why Senra
Senra Systems is tackling one of the most persistent yet overlooked bottlenecks in modern manufacturing: wire harness design and production. Our integrated platform bridges the gap between conception and creation, transforming an antiquated, error-prone process into a streamlined, efficient system that scales with the growing demands of our increasingly electrified world.
Technician assembling a complex wire harness
Source
Despite their ubiquity and importance, most people never see or hear about them, but without them modern machines simply wouldn't function. To put their significance into perspective: the Airbus A380 has around 330 miles of wiring in each aircraft, which is roughly the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Aviation machinist’s mate installing a wire harness on an F/A-18E Super Hornet engine.
Source
The system is broken
The harnessing industry continues to operate on outdated paradigms. Designs are bespoke, created using methods ranging from hand-drawn sketches to complex software that takes months or years to master. Visualization options are limited, and considerations for quality, speed, and cost-efficiency are often afterthoughts.
The handoff between designers and manufacturers involves days or weeks of back-and-forth communication via email to clarify requirements. Excel-based quoting is error-prone, and opportunities for cost optimization are frequently missed.
Once you get to production, manufacturers are often heavily reliant on tribal knowledge rather than standardized processes. Build instructions are often nonexistent, leading to inconsistent quality, and the manufacturing process remains a black box until the finished product appears.
But the consequences of these inefficiencies can be catastrophic. Quality issues due to design flaws, manufacturing mistakes, poor materials, and defective crimping or soldering can lead to serious failures. The Apollo 1 disaster, which claimed the lives of three astronauts, was partially attributed to electrical system failures including wire harness issues.
As technology advances and new machines are designed and built, the demand for wire harnesses is skyrocketing, and quality must keep pace with the speed of innovation. Traditional approaches simply cannot scale to meet this need. The industry faces a critical inflection point: evolve or become the bottleneck that constrains technological progress across sectors.
Our thesis
Modernizing an entire industry is obviously a significant undertaking. Generally speaking, you can think about fixing this problem in two ways:
The first option is to build a better factory. This will increase production speed through modern software and processes, and it would likely improve quality control, but it doesn't address the fundamental issue of bad design inputs. The tedious back-and-forth between designers and manufacturers remains, creating delays and opportunities for errors.
The second option is to build better design software. This reduces design errors and improves documentation, providing a more robust and consistent deliverable to manufacturers, but doesn't address the manufacturing challenges. Better software creates beautiful designs that still can't be efficiently built.
Senra’s thesis is that the only way to truly transform this process is to own the full scope of the problem, from design to delivery: build a better design tool and build a better factory.
Our integrated platform
Senra's approach offers built-in guardrails during harness design that entirely eliminate common design and build errors, not just remedy them. Our integrated platform consists of Amp (sign up for our public beta!), a browser-based design tool that delivers build-ready harnesses, and FactoryOS, a smart factory system that translates design data into comprehensive build instructions and auto-programmed machines.
Traditional harness procurement involves weeks of back-and-forth communication, creating frustrating delays and opportunities for errors. Senra's platform dramatically shrinks this timeline by ensuring designs created in Amp are instantly ready for manufacturing. This seamless transition allows for immediate parts ordering and production planning, eliminating the usual procurement bottlenecks.
Furthermore, Amp doesn’t just catch design errors after they occur. It prevents them from happening entirely. By incorporating manufacturing constraints directly into the design tool, we eliminate entire classes of common mistakes that plague traditional processes. Our platform intelligently suggests components based on availability, cost, and manufacturing considerations, resulting in shorter lead times, lower costs, and more reliable production schedules.
Transparency stands as one of Senra's core values, guiding how we approach the entire manufacturing process. Our platform provides comprehensive visibility from design to delivery, with robust data tracking build progress in real-time. We have future plans to extend this visibility directly to customers, ensuring everyone stays informed throughout the production journey.
However, what truly distinguishes Senra is our manufacturing flywheel, a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement that makes our factory smarter and faster with every build. When our team encounters manufacturing edge cases, solutions aren't just applied to the current project. They're systematically encoded back into both Amp and FactoryOS, ensuring the same question never needs to be asked again. This approach creates a constantly learning system that becomes more efficient and capable with each harness we produce.
Senra’s technology has proven valuable across numerous sectors, including aerospace, defense, agriculture, automotive, energy storage, maritime, robotics, and 3D printing. The platform's flexibility allows adaptation to the specific needs of each industry while maintaining core advantages of speed, quality, and efficiency.
Looking forward
Behind Senra is a team that combines decades of experience in wire harness design, industrial manufacturing, and software development. Our expertise creates advanced solutions that are grounded in real-world manufacturing experience.
We envision a future where wire harness design and manufacturing are no longer bottlenecks but enablers of technological progress. Our integrated software platform continues to evolve to address new challenges and incorporate emerging technologies. We’re always looking for new collaborations and partnerships and we’re hiring, so get in touch today!
For general inquiries: hello@senrasystems.us
For RFQ submissions: orders@senrasystems.us
