PTC, the Product Development Company, is on a roll. Even as it continues to launch new products and add big-name automotive companies to its roster of clients, the company took time off to address the worldwide media and analyst at Tampa, Florida on its future corporate and product strategy.
Among the vital questions that were answered at the three-day event were the relevance of PLM in a global market, and the sustainability of the company in spearheading the PLM campaign.
UNIFYING TECHNOLOGY
In his presentation to analysts, president and CEO, Richard Harrison acknowledged that product development was becoming harder than ever before. The complexities involved with product development were increasing as it truly became a global, 24x7 process. He said that that the technological challenge of unifying product development across multiple companies and locations was not lost on OEMs . They were looking for solutions that consolidated fragmented IT environments and unified the disparate technologies that did not work together.
“The changing market conditions are favourable to PTC,” he said. “We have gained significant competitive advantage even as our competitors are going through changes. And this cannot be easily won in this intensely competitive market.” Much of this competitive advantage has come from such products as Pro-Engineer, Windchill, Arbortext and Mathcad. These have ensured that the company, today, has over 800,000 users across the aerospace and defence, automotive, electronics, industrial equipment, consumer products and life sciences industries.
The road forward, he said, was to follow a consistent strategy that would provide long-term success to both clients and investors. “The long term goal is to reach $1.5 billion in revenue by 2010. We expect to grow organic revenue 10-12 percent annually, and we plan to make strategic acquisitions,” he said.
And, in line with these goals, the company announced the release of Windchill 9.0 and Windchill MPMLink, an integral module of Windchill 9.0 for manufacturing process management (MPM).
As an integral component of the PTC’s Product Development System (PDS), Windchill is a proven solution that provides collaboration, control and configuration of product content to over 3,000 global manufactures. It enables companies to reuse designs, make modifications, manage work-in-process tasks, and synchronise activities among workgroups and the enterprise.
ENHANCED CAPABILITY
With a host of improvements in enterprise product content management, Windchill 9.0 helps companies meet corporate business goals by streamlining key product development processes. “Windchill 9.0 gives manufacturers a complete solution that goes beyond departmental boundaries to allow sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing and partners to more effectively participate in product development and contribute towards realising business goals,” said executive vice president, software products and chief product officer, James Heppelmann.
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The Windchill 9.0 release includes new embedded visualisation capabilities which improves user productivity in loading, interacting and distributing visualisation data. It comes with enhanced reporting capabilities that includes real-time, out-of-the box reports on change management activities, user task status and project progress.
The development of Windchill MPMLink began with PTC’s acquisition of Polyplan in June 2005. Since then, the company has redeveloped the solution as a fully integral module of Windchill. Transforming engineering designs into bills of materials (BOMs) and manufacturing processes has been a cumbersome process that only begins late in the product design lifecycle. Windchill MPMLink focuses on the daily core issue of managing process plans and resources without requiring complex, expensive, simulation-focused tools.
COST PRESSURES
It allows manufacturing engineers to develop processes from the same product information that is defined by the engineering department, eliminating the problems inherent in creating and maintaining duplicate product information. By easily transforming engineering BOMs (eBOMs) into manufacturing BOMs (mBOMs) and defining and managing the manufacturing processes in the same system, companies can ensure that the product are accurately manufactured according to design specifications.
With the digital manufacturing capabilities of Windchill MPMLink, manufacturers can now reduce manufacturing costs, improve product and data quality, reduce scrap and rework, improve the accuracy of manufacturing deliverables, and shorten development cycle time by concurrently developing the product designs and the manufacturing processes. This is especially important to the automotive industry that continually delivers new, innovative products with extreme cost and time-to-market pressures. Both Windchill 9.0 and Windchill MPMLink will become commercially available in September 2007.
INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY
Meanwhile, Toyota Motor has deployed Windchill PDMLink 8.0 as part of a strategic process improvement initiative for its powertrain division. This is in line with Toyota’s goal to improve product development processes, improve quality, increase productivity and reduce powertrain development time.
Toyota’s decision to deploy Windchill is based on the success it achieved in design cycle time reduction and process improvements for modeling and simulation with Pro-Engineer, and 3D CAD software. “The partnership we
have with Toyota is succeeding because of our joint commitment to develop technology solutions," said Richard Harrison. PTC provides enterprise solutions such as 3D design, product data management and collaboration solutions to over 1400 automotive manufacturers