Software Combination provides product lifecycle management.
Press Release Summary:
Pro/ENGINEER® product design and development solution combined with Windchill® collaboration and control solutions offers essential elements of PLM designed to work as single integral system. Using this system, companies can create high fidelity digital products, collaborate throughout extended digital value chain, and control all associated product information and processes. Modular system can be deployed incrementally and is supported by packaged services.
Original Press Release:
PTC's Breakthrough Product Development System Makes Product Lifecycle Management Accessible
Linking Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire and Windchill Yields Industry's First Integral System for Simple, Low-risk and Inexpensive Approach to PLM
NEEDHAM, MA. - March 3, 2003 - PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), the product development company(TM), today unveiled the industry's first comprehensive product development system and architecture that enable companies to more easily implement product lifecycle management (PLM) while meeting the increasingly complex challenges of product development.
Companies today are struggling with poor data interoperability, high integration costs and the high maintenance costs associated with portfolios of point solutions and legacy systems. At the same time, they are seeking to build the technical infrastructure for PLM while being constrained by flat or declining IT budgets.
By taking a systematic approach in seamlessly connecting its Pro/ENGINEER® product design and development solution with its Windchill® collaboration and control solutions on the best architectural foundation, PTC is now the only vendor to offer all the essential elements of PLM designed to work as a single integral system. Using this system, companies can create high fidelity digital products, collaborate throughout their extended digital value chain, and control all associated product information and processes.
The modular system can be deployed incrementally and is supported by packaged services, enabling companies to implement a common, open PLM architecture that is expandable, and links legacy applications and heterogeneous CAD systems while protecting past IT investments. This comprehensive yet flexible array of products and services enables customers to deploy product development systems according to their particular needs, timetables and strategies.
"Our product development system is the culmination of a significant research and development investment by PTC to give our customers a complete integral system rather than a patchwork quilt of products that require costly and time-consuming integration efforts," said PTC President and Chief Executive Officer C. Richard Harrison. "This up-front investment by PTC will significantly reduce the overall cost of ownership for our customers.
"The system, supported by our Product First Roadmap, enables companies to significantly improve their business with a centralized focus around creating better products through specific product development strategies, initiatives and competencies.
By placing products first they can better capture the growth and profitability value opportunities that are resident in the product development process," Harrison observed.
Architecture Matters
"Product development is a complex inter-enterprise process, and optimizing it requires a systematic approach built on the right architectural foundation," says PTC Executive Vice President, Software Solutions and Chief Product Officer James Heppelmann. "A solid product development architecture must provide performance, scalability, flexibility, usability, security and integration capabilities. It must support the data integrity and data distribution needs of the extended enterprise, and it must provide companies with the hardware platform and infrastructure options they need to manage their total cost of ownership effectively."
"To date, many companies have been intimidated by PLM. Our cohesive product development system is a real break-through in that it affords customers a 'one stop shopping' experience that allows them to deploy a comprehensive PLM footprint on a single integral architecture and avoid the integration headaches that have long been associated with PLM point solutions," Heppelmann noted. "By providing a single desktop CAD engine and a single Web-based data management and collaboration engine that are seamlessly connected via Web Services protocols, we uniquely provide our customers with a simple, low-risk, and inexpensive approach to optimize their product development processes."
Adoption Management Key to Success
The key to successfully implementing a product development system resides in an organization's ability to manage the people, processes and technology associated with the system. PTC offers a comprehensive portfolio of services and training that are packaged to best suit customer needs - as fixed price bundles, a la carte offerings, or configurable solutions. Built on tested and proven methods, the services greatly reduce the costs and risks of implementation, positively impact product development processes, decrease the loss of employee productivity during implementation, and identify ongoing opportunities to leverage the product development process to create superior products.
Benefits of PTC's Product Development System
PTC's product development system provides substantial benefits to customers, including: greater productivity through increased product development speed; a single "system of record" for all product information throughout the entire process; reduced training time and expense as users are able to work within their familiar environment as they create, collaborate and control within the development process; better management of interdependencies among suppliers; and ultimately reduced total cost of ownership from a streamlined system requiring less custom integration and connections.
"An optimized product development process is becoming an important competitive differentiator. It is the means to consistently bring superior products to market," Heppelmann says. "That requires a complete system that streamlines and simplifies all the processes involved, freeing people to focus on the products themselves. PTC's product development system provides the means to achieve those goals."
About PTC
PTC develops, markets, and supports software solutions that help manufacturers win with superior products. PTC is the world's largest software company with a total commitment to product development. The company services more than 35,000 customers worldwide. Further information on PTC is available at www.ptc.com or call 1-888-782-3776, ext. 901
