CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

24 September 2007

Implementation Investments

Schindler Improved Global Collaboration With PTC® Product Development System

PTC announced that Schindler Group, a world-leading manufacturer of escalators and elevators headquartered in Ebikon, Switzerland, has expanded its relationship with PTC. A long-standing customer of PTC Pro/ENGINEER® 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software, Schindler adopted the PTC Product Development System with its recent selection of Windchill® for content and process management. The use of PTC solutions supports Schindler's key business processes in product development, such as variant design, design outsourcing, and change and configuration management. By implementing a common product development infrastructure based on Windchill, the company improved the collaboration among engineering sites in Europe, South and North America, and China and reduced time-to-market for its highly customized products.

Schindler is one of largest manufacturers of escalators and elevators for almost every type of building, with more than 40,000 employees worldwide. Globally, more than 700 million people per day use the company's elevators, escalators and moving walks, which are designed and built in accordance with customer requirements. Many different product variants are created every day and must be serviced over a lifecycle of up to 30 years. The company has been a PTC customer since 1998. The Schindler development teams use Pro/ENGINEER for advanced modelling and variant generation, which enables them to design a maximum number of variants from a limited number of base designs, thus reducing engineering costs, time-to-market and inventory.

"After identifying the potential for additional realized value by optimizing key product development processes, we decided to move from Pro/INTRALINK® to Windchill to take advantage of the enhanced collaboration capabilities globally," said Marc Schaad, vice president and head of services & testing at Schindler. "The PTC Product Development System now provides us with powerful tools to manage models, assemblies and bills of material for our core product range, as well as our customer-specific variants across the extended enterprise."

PTC's Global Services organization helped Schindler to move its Pro/ENGINEER data from Pro/INTRALINK to Windchill. Additionally, PTC Global Services consultants implemented Schindler's working methods and processes for release to manufacturing and change management, as well as deploying Windchill as the collaboration platform for the corporate R&D and the local engineering sites that also allows authorized access for external partners.

"The new product development processes reduced search times for product related information and simplified the data exchange between all our R&D locations and the manufacturing sites," said Schaad. "The PTC Product Development System makes design reuse and customization of existing designs a lot easier than in the past, when our information was dispersed across various locations. Now, all of our information is accessible from a single source."

Schindler is also deploying the powerful configuration management capabilities of Windchill to support Schindler's after-market services business, a key part of the company's strategic business objective of "Leadership through Services". All customized product variants and modifications or upgrades, including the latest 3D models, are stored over the product lifecycle in one central database which ensures minimum lead times for spare part production and the ability to offer custom solutions for replacement or modernization.

"Industrial equipment manufacturers face multiple challenges in the global economy. They have to design and deliver customer-specific products in record time and must offer excellent services," said Josh Fredberg, vice president product and market strategy, PTC. "This requires a new approach to product development through analyzing the value potential of all the business processes involved and tying it back to product development investment to achieve the overall business objectives."

Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.

Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.

CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.

Subscribe