CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 November 2007
Implementation Investments
Small and Medium Businesses Execute Global Product Development Initiatives with PTC® Windchill®
PTC announced that small and medium businesses (SMB) are implementing its Windchill content and process management solution to help achieve success in their global product development initiatives. Windchill helps companies manage and configure complete product development content, and optimize the broad set of product development processes necessary to bring products to market and manage them over the entire lifecycle. The momentum of Windchill adoption was recently reflected in PTC's fourth quarter earnings results, which reported the highest revenue for Windchill solutions in the company's history.
"Small and medium businesses today are faced with increasing product complexity, competition from larger counterparts and the need to shorten time to market, " said Jay Muelhoefer, vice president, channel solutions, PTC . "Windchill provides data vaulting, automated revision control and improved collaboration capabilities that help these companies to shorten product development cycles, respond faster to changing requirements, and share data with team members located anywhere in the world, increasing competitive advantage. PTC offers customers either an on-premise or software-as-a service deployment option to fit their business needs."
Vette Corp is a premier global thermal management solutions provider of custom heat sinks and thermal solutions for leading OEMs across the computer and industrial electronics industries. Vette is unique in its ability to rapidly design and deliver high volumes of low-cost, custom solutions to North American and European customers. Vette's product development teams include design and application engineers in North America and Asia, and manufacturing teams in China and Taiwan.
Vette's critical challenge to enable concurrent design between client, engineering and manufacturing teams over the life of a product was further complicated by language barriers and time zone differences. To solve this challenge, the company selected PTC Windchill. Internet-based Windchill is an ideal fit for the global 24/7 environment of Vette's business. "Windchill provides a single repository that any team member worldwide can access to get the correct version of a model or documentation at any time," said Dan Price, technical sales engineer, Vette Corp. "The Windchill On Demand deployment option enables us to focus on our core product development competencies, resulting in reduced rework and shortened product development cycles with minimal investment."
Tribotek is a leading electrical interconnect technology company that focuses on the design, development and manufacture of innovative high-density power and data connectors that deliver improved performance and density characteristics. Tribotek found that its lack of data management capabilities often resulted in multiple copies of same part in different locations. The company is located in Burlington, Mass. with design, manufacturing and sales teams spread across the United States and China. Tribotek required a data management solution that provided a centralized data vault for controlling and storing all product data, the ability to easily share the most recent product content among its worldwide product development organization and control of key change and lifecycle management processes. PTC Windchill provided the ideal solution with low costs, low IT resource requirements, fast deployment, and fast time to value. "It has been essential in providing accessibility of accurate product information to our worldwide product development, manufacturing, and sales teams," said Greg Mark, manager, engineering, Tribotek. "With PTC Windchill our worldwide product development team will be able to quickly find and access the most recent product information."
Transformational Defense Industries (TDI) is an emerging company focused on the research and development of new technologies for defense applications. TDI has revolutionized its recoil management system for small and medium caliber weapons that redirects recoil forces allowing for less felt recoil and higher accuracy at high rates of fire. One of TDI's main business challenges is to move from concept to product in less time while simultaneously building itself into a global product development company. TDI selected PTC Windchill to build an extended virtual product development organization with limited resources. Windchill gave TDI the ability to effectively collaborate and manage data with partners, suppliers and customers across that virtual product development team. Windchill facilitates secure sharing of specifications, design, and test data with suppliers, outsourced engineering and US Army Research Centers. Additionally, Windchill provides efficient management of product data as TDI's engineering team evolved. "Sharing information amongst team members is critical to the success of most projects but can become very challenging when the teams are spread across different locations," said Tim Lindsay, vice president, TDI. "We would not have been able to design and prototype systems in the time that we have without the collaborative environment that Windchill provides."
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.