The German term "kundenspezifischer Kabelsatz" (abbreviation KSK ) means exemplarily the test of individual variants of one product.
Today in industrial companies, many products are manufactured in a variety of variants on one production line. As an example, cable harnesses in the automotive industry are produced by a component supplier just-in-time and according to the individual requirements for a car manufacturer. During the process, it is mandatory to keep the correct order of the goods and to meet the circle times since this component is sent in "parent bundles" only shortly before its final installation into the end product.
The challenge when testing is the verification of a variety of different cable harnesses (or components) on one single test system. The correct assignment of the matching test program to the unit under test (UUT) is mandatory. Often this is managed with the help of a connected barcode scanner. After scanning the barcode at the UUT the test system loads the matching test program and verifies the UUT according to its parameters. They include besides cable test incl. open test and short test also the functional test, which needs - when testing different variants of a product - to prove a variety of different functionalities. The results are reported back to the ERP* system and the individual unit can be either finished or reworked.
In case a manufacturer is ISO 9001 certified, often test results need to be logged and saved in a database for retracing and for further analysing in statistics.
*ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning