How machine builders can cut wiring time and complexity

A modern machine can easily carry hundreds of individual connection points once every sensor, drive, actuator and diagnostic feature is accounted for. On a large or densely instrumented system, that number can climb significantly. Each one needs a cable, a terminal and someone to wire it in correctly. Multiply that across a growing machine fleet and it's easy to see how wiring has quietly become one of the biggest hidden time costs in machine building.

Machines are only getting smarter and the number of sensors used across industrial applications is growing with them. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global industrial sensors market will grow from $27.46 billion in 2025 to $42.88 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 9.32 per cent. As manufacturers continue to adopt automation and connected technologies, machine builders face more sensors, drives and connected features to design, build and test on every project.

If machine builders keep relying on traditional point-to-point wiring, the problem will only get bigger. The good news is that it doesn't have to.

Wiring time is more than the time spent wiring

When people picture the cost of wiring, they usually picture someone standing at a control cabinet connecting cables. In reality, that's just the visible part of a much longer process.

Before a single cable is terminated, there's design work to plan every connection. Then there's the control cabinet itself, which has to be specified, built and populated. Once the machine is wired, every connection needs to be tested and any faults found during that process need to be traced and fixed, which is often the most time-consuming stage of all.

Add it all up and wiring touches almost every stage between concept and commissioning. For machine builders, that means it directly affects how quickly a machine can be built, tested, shipped and invoiced. Fewer wiring mistakes and faster fault-finding could be the difference between a project running on schedule and one that doesn't.

Reducing the wiring itself

The most direct way to tackle this problem is to reduce the amount of traditional wiring a machine needs in the first place. This is where technologies like EtherCAT and distributed I/O come in.

Rather than running an individual cable from every sensor, drive and actuator back to a central controller, EtherCAT allows a single network cable to carry communication to and from many devices in sequence. Distributed I/O takes this further by moving I/O points out to where the sensors and actuators actually are on the machine, instead of routing every signal back to a central cabinet. Together, they cut the amount of point-to-point cabling dramatically, without any compromise on performance.

Rethinking whether you need a cabinet at all

The next question machine builders are increasingly asking is whether a traditional control cabinet is needed at all. Control cabinet-free automation platforms, such as Beckhoff's MX-System, replace the conventional steel enclosure with modular, IP67-rated function modules that mount directly onto the machine structure itself.

Because power supply, control and I/O elements are built into standardised, pre-engineered modules, there's far less cabinet design, panel building and internal wiring to do in the first place. In practice, that can be the difference between assembly and testing taking a day or more and taking around an hour.

Standardising for repeatable savings

Plug-and-play connectors and pre-assembled cables extend the same principle to the rest of the machine, replacing manual termination with connections that simply click into place. For machine builders producing the same machine or variations of it repeatedly, standardising these connections across the platform means that time saved on one build is saved again on every build after it. Over the lifetime of a product line, those savings multiply significantly.

Quicker machine assembly and commissioning, fewer wiring errors and faster troubleshooting all shorten the path from build to delivery. For machine builders, that means getting finished machines out to customers much faster.

Nobody would choose to untangle thousands of cables if there was a simpler way to connect them in the first place. Machine builders face the same choice at a much larger scale. As machines become more connected and complex, reducing the number of individual connections and simplifying how they are made can save time, reduce errors and make every machine easier to build. The goal is not to get better at untangling the wires, but to stop creating the tangle in the first place.