Wiring harness system boosts productivity in complex systems

Capital HarnessXC, which goes on general availability next month, is the first harness design-to-manufacture package to take in electrical design data, add mechanical data and provide MRP feed MRP and ATE (automatic test equipment) feed while also handling policy-based multi-source database management. Mentor Graphics product director Nick Smith makes the point that design change has been an issues slowing development productivity for years. “Engineers spend about 20% of their time doing design and 80% managing the change work because wiring harnesses come at the end of the process, they’re physically flexible and manufacturing is very manual and done in low cost countries.” The new system goes to the root of the problem – different data sources resulting in component databases being obsoleted by mechanical or electrical changes, thus losing style data. “The new system traps and controls changes and doesn’t overwrite the data you need according to rules you define in a policy manager,” he explains. Beyond that, it also automates data-driven graphical styling, transferring between the formats for companies like Ford, VW, Renault and Boeing. “You could buy modules for this, but they were all hard-wired. Now we have a style engine so that the wiring data is king and we can just apply graphical styling and render drawing for whatever customer.