Behind every electrical engineering project are many individual components and thus a whole collection of data: 2D/3D CAD data, data sheets, type sheets and certificates are all part of any decent documentation. "Comparatively more time is spent on article research and the collection, conversion and storage of related documents than on the design itself," says Andreas Wedel, Director of Digital Transformation at the HARTING Technology Group. That is why he and his team are working on new functions that will facilitate the data management for HARTING’s products and solutions.

Wish lists and digital notes in the online catalogue

"Many of our customers still cling to old HARTING catalogues, not so much out of nostalgia, but because they are full of notes and bookmarks," explains Wedel. “We wanted to make this practical way of working also possible in our online catalogue.” The option to add items to your own wish lists has been available in the HARTING eShop for a long time. A new option is to add own text notes for individual HARTING articles. These notes can be managed via the myHARTING customer portal and filtered for all the articles that have been noted.

Saving time with data packets

Additional functions are aimed at the rapid provision of product data and documents that are necessary in the electrical design documentation. The design data, data sheets and type sheets for all individual components often add up to hundreds of documents. Previously, these often had to be downloaded from the provider (including from HARTING) in individual steps. Using the new data manager, product data for up to 50 HARTING articles can now be obtained in a single step from the HARTING website as a collected data packet.

50 different 2D/3D data formats for direct download

Up until now, HARTING has provided design data for its products in STEP and JT formats. In practice, however, significantly more formats are used. Thus, many HARTING customers still had to convert the data into their desired format. With the new MultiCAD download function, native 2D/3D CAD data are now available for download in over 50 different formats. This means that HARTING articles can be processed immediately in the desired data format for design purposes. This MultiCAD function is currently available for over 13,000 items in the HARTING online catalogue.

Customer portal offers many functions

The new functions can be found at the myHARTING customer portal, which already provides many e-commerce functions for HARTING customers. "Anyone who is professionally involved with our products and solutions can easily register and use all the service at myHARTING free of charge," explains Andreas Wedel.