Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced that it has completed deployment of its Capital® product suite at Pilatus Aircraft Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of single-engine turboprop aircraft. The Capital product suite is a powerful electrical system and wire harness design flow for the automotive, aerospace and defense industries.

A key part of the solution, and an important driver behind Pilatus' selection of the Capital solution, is technology that allows enterprise-wide data integration between the Capital software and the Teamcenter® system from Siemens PLM. Design data integrity is of critical importance in the aerospace industry, so close linkage between data created by the Capital tool in the electrical computer aided design (ECAD) domain with other domains not only delivers improved design efficiency and cost saving operational automation, but is central to Pilatus' engineering process flow.

The deployment was delivered by the Mentor® consulting staff working alongside Pilatus and Siemens PLM personnel. It involved maintaining Pilatus engineering productivity while replacing existing ECAD workflows, functionally integrating the Capital software to the current Siemens Teamcenter environment, and optimizing working processes between them to automate previously manual operational sequences and introduce new capabilities. Existing Pilatus ECAD designs were also migrated into the Capital software's data-centric format. This allows existing design work to be re-used in new aircraft programs, and to leverage the new IT environment for documentation and maintenance of existing aircraft.

"Keeping our products ahead of the market requires the creation of intimate connections between avionics and other aspects of the aircraft, such as mechanical systems and airframe, both physically and in the way they are designed," said Bruno Cervia, vice president, Research & Development, Pilatus. "The Capital solution defined by Mentor consultants will allow our design teams in Stans to explore and advance our products via integrated electrical systems architectures. This will bring clear benefits to those who buy and service our products, such as weight and life cycle cost savings."

"The Pilatus deployment of the Capital product suite is a perfect example of how the full resources of Mentor are applied in the service of the customer," said Paul Hofstadler, vice president of Mentor's Consulting Division. "Mentor's goal is to enable customers to seamlessly adopt our leading-edge technology, with minimal disruption to workflow productivity. The end result here has been successful deployment of an advanced system that is both technically optimized and integrated into the enterprise data flow, enabling Pilatus engineers to quickly solve sophisticated technical problems while enabling advanced business processes."