Developed in close consultation with major OEMs and tier one harness makers, Capital HarnessXC leverages both Mentor's experience as a supplier of harness design tools and the modern software architecture of the Capital Harness System (CHS) family of products. Though spanning a wide flow, CHS tools must typically integrate with other enterprise applications. Historically such integrations have been hard to maintain, but CHS employs a modern service-oriented architecture to ensure integration longevity. Several of the new tool's functions (such as data reporting and drawing access) are available as web services, industry-leading integration with common MCAD packages such as CATIA V5 and Unigraphics NX is provided; and other important CHS tools such as Capital Costing can be fed directly from Capital HarnessXC.

The product creates engineered and costed harness designs that reflect the full manufacturing bill-of-materials. The product significantly enhances the CHS offering, which provides a data-centric design flow spanning logical systems definition, wiring integration and analysis through to detailed harness engineering.

Capital HarnessXC is built on CHS's data management capability, and offers seamless integration with the CHS electrical design tools. Many capabilities, ranging from component definition and project management to a common user interface, carry directly across the toolset. Capital HarnessXC also introduces a brand new capability to manage design change. The embedded change policy manager enables organizations to configure in detail how design changes are evaluated and applied, whether those changes are authored within CHS or imported from another CAD application. This supports a fully automated design change process that eliminates manual user intervention, a common source of error. This ensures value-add data embellishments can be preserved and re-applied appropriately and automatically. Design change occurs very frequently in this domain, so proper control of change is a critical issue.

A second key technology delivered with the new tool is an intelligent styling capability. Harness design drawings must typically be produced in various styles or formats. The style management functionality uses a sophisticated query engine to render drawings based on the underlying design data and configurable graphical standards. Various graphical formats can be defined and applied across different projects. Not only saving re-drawing time, this capability maximizes design data re-use and promotes organizational flexibility.
All core CHS products, including Capital HarnessXC, are deployable either as point tools that can be integrated into a multi-vendor flow or in a tightly coupled CHS flow where the full potential of the supporting infrastructure can be leveraged. The new product will be available in late 2006. Pricing starts at $18,200. More information is available directly from Mentor .