Tool extension targets wire harness costs

Mentor Graphics has announced availability of Capital Harness MPM™, a software application extension to help wire harness manufacturers cut production costs. Addressing manufacturing process management, Capital Harness MPM 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, an electrical system and wire harness design environment for the automotive, aerospace, and defense industries. The new tool delivers additional production engineering capability to Capital’s Define-Design-Build-Service flow.

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.

Lyle Fahning, chairman of the Wire Harness Manufacturers Association said, "Good cost-effective designs are critical to meeting the customer needs in our industry and assuring profitability to our member manufacturing companies. Too often this is a manual, ad hoc process that fails to utilize appropriate tools for optimization of the design and manufacturing costs. Mentor [has] the expertise to develop application products to support this important product development process. Technology that helps our members understand design, manufacturability, and cost issues more effectively will make a major contribution to our industry."

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 HarnessXC™, Capital ModularXC™ or VeSys® Harness tools can be analyzed.

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