CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
16 January 2007
Implementation Investments
Small and Medium Businesses Overcome Growth Challenges with PTC® Windchill®
PTC announced that Windchill, the PTC solution for content and process management, continues to gain momentum as the PLM solution of choice for small and medium businesses (SMB). Windchill helps companies control product development data and enable internal and external product development collaboration, solving key challenges for growing businesses. In fiscal 2006, total revenue from the PTC reseller channel grew 24% to $171.5 million compared to the same period last year. The growth reflects continued success in selling PTC's Pro/ENGINEER, as well as increased sales of Windchill solutions in the SMB market.
"Because of their size, SMB customers experience some unique challenges including resource and infrastructure constraints that can hinder the success of their product development initiatives," said Tom Shoemaker, vice president solutions marketing, PTC. "Windchill provides an optimal solution for overcoming these obstacles with an enterprise class tool that offers powerful capabilities for content management and collaboration with the scalability needed to support their ongoing growth."
RollEase is a PTC customer that designs and manufactures patented manual window covering systems for residential and commercial applications. Like many small businesses lacking the resources and IT infrastructure often available to larger enterprises, RollEase had implemented a home-grown filing system for product data management. The labor-intensive system relied upon the constant creation of new folders to manage data as new products were developed and as revisions were made to existing parts and products. The process initially satisfied the company's requirements but quickly became outdated. As the product line grew, RollEase found it increasingly difficult to manage revisions, data reuse and modeling techniques using the old system. To resolve these challenges, RollEase enlisted the help of Performance Engineering, a PTC reseller. After careful evaluation, the company selected Windchill PDMlinkT to help manage all forms of product data - including mechanical, electrical and software. "Windchill provides us with a closed loop change management system that enables us to easily track and manage revisions," said Joseph Cannaverde, Project Manager, RollEase. "Moreover, it increased our ability to efficiently use library parts for data reuse, lowering development costs and increasing speed to market."
Gencoa Ltd, a manufacturer of magnetron sputtering cathodes, selected Windchill PDMLink and Windchill ProjectLinkT to streamline its product development process and improve cross-functional collaboration and data visibility with off-site manufacturing plants and customers based across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific. The new product development system will reduce rework and translation of documented information. Used in conjunction with Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill will improve data search, version control, collation and accelerate the quotation process and production cycle. In the past, the design process was a bottleneck and a major component of production costs. "PTC's product development system enables us to realise product standardisation and improved parts management. The system will give us better control of the design and drawings inside the enterprise and working with external partners and customers," said Gencoa founder and CEO Dr. Dermot Monaghan. "Windchill helps us share new ideas with our customers, and improves our time to market for innovative products serving a wide range of industries."
Canadian based Venmar Ventilation has been one of North America's leading manufacturers of innovative Indoor Air Quality products for residential applications for more than 25 years. Venmar selected Windchill PDMLink as the PLM tool of choice and BRT Solutions, a PTC channel partner, as implementer, to meet its challenges to manage and share information relating to its growing, innovative product lines. Windchill PDMLink enables the Venmar design team and multiple users in different divisions to concurrently work on the same assembly without compromising each other's revisions. "Windchill PDMLink has enabled us to make significant improvements in our product development process," said Marc-Andre Verville, design technician, Venmar. "We're able to produce more products in the same amount of time and have shortened our time to market by twenty-five percent. Ultimately, this leads to more revenue."
About PTC Solutions for SMB
PTC solutions for the small and medium business (SMB) market are designed to provide easy-to-use, yet scaleable 3D CAD/CAM/CAE solutions for manufacturing companies at an affordable price. In addition PTC provides dedicated product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions for the unique product data management and collaboration requirements to the midrange market. PTC currently serves over 35,000 SMB customers in 41 countries through more than 320 Value Added Resellers (VARs).
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