PTC to Extend PLM Solutions to Manufacturing Process Development

PTC Acquires Polyplan to Accelerate Manufacturing Strategy

ORLANDO, Florida – June 6, 2005- At the 2005 PTC/USER World conference in Orlando, PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), the Product Development Company™, today unveiled its strategy to enable simultaneous product and process development through enhanced manufacturing process solutions. The strategy extends PTC’s current solution offerings, including Pro/ENGINEER^® and Windchill®, with capabilities that deliver strong business benefits such as reduced time-to-market, streamlined change management, and reduced manufacturing costs. PTC will add many of these new capabilities through the acquisition and integration of Polyplan Technologies Inc., a technology leader in manufacturing planning.

The extended manufacturing strategy builds on PTC’s mission to deliver simple, powerful, and connected tools for product development. PTC will focus its extended manufacturing strategy on providing an easy-to-use and affordable solution for use by mainstream manufacturing engineers who have traditionally shunned the complex, disconnected, specialist manufacturing process management (MPM) tools available today.

“Manufacturing companies face intense pressures to speed the process of developing and building products. But so often, the process is slowed down by weak communication between design and manufacturing engineers, lack of centralized access to current data, and the use of disconnected processes and tools at various points in the product lifecycle,” said Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer of PTC. “Our expanded manufacturing solutions will enable customers to dramatically reduce time-to-market by breaking down the existing barriers between design and manufacturing, and by providing, for the first time, an integral system for product and process development.”

“Manufacturing planning has emerged as a critical part of the overall product development lifecycle. Automating and integrating the manufacturing engineering process will provide significant benefits including reduced product costs and improved time to market,” said Gisela Wilson, Analyst of PLM Solutions at international market research firm IDC. “PTC is taking the right approach by making manufacturing engineering an extension of their Windchill-based Product Development System. IDC predicts that the market for manufacturing process planning tools will grow to $1.45B by 2008,” she continued. “Polyplan is a great choice for PTC. Their focus on innovative, Internet-based, easy-to-use, manufacturing process planning tools makes them a perfect fit for PTC’s product line and customer base.”

PTC’s strategy for manufacturing includes:

Enabling design for manufacture and assembly by capturing and managing features directly within the Pro/ENGINEER model
Delivering advanced manufacturing engineering capabilities, including process plan creation, time and cost analysis, line balancing, and creation of associative operator work instructions and CNC tool paths, through the integration of Polyplan with Windchill
Leveraging Windchill collaboration tools to streamline and control communication with outsourced manufacturers and remote plants
Applying Windchill best-in-class configuration management and change management capabilities to manufacturing processes and resources
Enabling electronic shop floor delivery of visual work instructions and collection of operator feedback
Out-of-the-box ERP integration with key systems like SAP and Oracle

Polyplan has been part of the PTC software partner program for several years. Polyplan's clean technology architecture, based on the same modern J2EE and web standards as Windchill, enables the rapid incorporation of manufacturing capabilities into PTC's product development system.

“Polyplan has taken a strategic and innovative approach to process planning,” said Gilles B. Paul, asset optimization director of Bombardier Transportation, North America. “We have been working closely with Polyplan to ensure that their product meets our needs and it is now in use to address our manufacturing planning for new products. Using the Polyplan solution has enabled us to improve the collaborative work environment between product design and manufacturing engineers. This has led to early validation of product manufacturability and accelerates the design of the best solution. We look forward to working with PTC in the future as they advance the current offering.”

Polyplan is a private company based in Montreal, Canada. The company was spun out of École Polytechnique in Montreal, an international leader in training and research in the field of engineering. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Published at 20:02

11 March 2011