IC design has captured the glamour of electronic design for at least the last twenty five years, yet IC's are useless without a sound system design that includes not only PC Boards, but also the cabling that connect the electronic part to the rest of the system.

Mentor Graphics Corporation announced availability of Capital Harness MPMT, an application that helps wire harness manufacturers cut production costs. Addressing manufacturing process management, Capital Harness MPM systematically models harness designs against production capabilities to create structured bill-of-materials data. This data is typically used to drive enterprise resource management (ERP) systems. Capital Harness MPM is part of the Capital tool suite.

Technically, Capital Harness MPM employs a reasoning engine specially developed for the wire harness domain. This reasoning engine intelligently decomposes harness designs into hierarchical assembly steps that match production capabilities. Manufacturing intellectual property can be flexibly and securely captured using an extensible rules-based approach so that (for example) custom-built production equipment can be modeled. Design data created in the Mentor Capital HarnessXCT, Capital ModularXCT or VeSys Harness tools can be analyzed.

Wire harness manufacturing is a logistically challenging, multi-stage process that is difficult to optimize, especially because designs change frequently and configuration complexity is high. By analyzing harness designs against factory capabilities, Capital Harness MPM helps identify what, where and how harnesses and their constituent sub-assemblies should be built. Manufacturing costs can be reduced by accurately reflecting optimized manufacturing patterns. In addition, Capital Harness MPM helps minimize inventory and obsolescence costs and achieve economies of scale by identifying sub-assemblies that are common across different harness designs. The automation delivered also helps minimize manufacturing engineering errors and cycle times, and reduces staff training costs.