PTC Extends Windchill Capabilities, Integrates with Integrity
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PTC Extends Windchill Capabilities, Integrates with Integrity

Company Leverages Integrity for Comprehensive Requirements Management

NEEDHAM, Mass. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 9, 2012 — PTC® (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced the latest version of its Windchill® product lifecycle management (PLM) software, which is now also integrated with PTC’s recently acquired Integrity™ software system lifecycle management technology. Windchill 10.1 introduces sweeping enhancements to the product’s capabilities in a wide range of areas, while integrating Windchill with Integrity raises the bar for how manufacturers gather and manage requirements and trace related changes. In addition, Windchill Mobile™ is now available from the Apple iTunes store for the iPad and iPhone.

“At PTC, our goal is to help manufacturers find new ways to compete in their markets, and to make their success repeatable over time,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, PLM Segment, PTC. “With this new version of Windchill, we’ve not only enhanced a number of critical functional areas, but we’ve also made major improvements to the user experience and serviceability of the product across-the-board. We believe that PTC is continuing to set the pace for the value companies can generate when they deploy enterprise-class PLM technology.”

Do More: Comprehensive Requirements Management from Integrity

Less than a year after being acquired by PTC Integrity is dramatically expanding PTC’s footprint of capabilities. Specifically, PTC has integrated Windchill and Integrity to combine the rich, collaborative requirements authoring and management capabilities of Integrity with the powerful “flow-down” traceability offered in Windchill. This combination delivers powerful, comprehensive requirements management capabilities and enables manufacturers to improve product quality, reduce rework and improve time to market.

In addition, Windchill now integrates with the software change and configuration management capabilities of Integrity – and other leading tools – to manage defects and issues, as well as enable software releases to be synchronized with product configurations.

Requirements gathering and management is one of the most critical aspects of a product’s lifecycle. According to industry analyst firm CIMdata, “Requirements management is all about balance—preventing one class of requirements from overriding another is critical. Effective requirements management ensures that the voice of the customer is captured and managed throughout the lifecycle of the product. This enables a company to design, build, and deliver products and services that meet or exceed their customers’ needs and expectations.”1

In addition, Windchill’s core configuration management capabilities have been further enhanced to provide advanced support for configurable products. Together with new digital mock-up capabilities in Creo® 2.0, these enhancements in Windchill contribute to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision; promising to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures.

PTC is also extending the breadth of product-related content that can be managed in Windchill for retail and consumer product companies. With a new version of its FlexPLM technology, companies can now reference CAD models managed in a Windchill environment – giving retail product designers much greater visibility and understanding of how to work with products that have both hard and soft goods (e.g. a chair’s frame and fabric).

Know More: Track Compliance, Quality, Cost

In the critical area of compliance, PTC has extended Windchill’s capabilities for tracking and monitoring regulated materials use. For example, the recent Conflict Minerals legislation passed by the US Government drove the introduction of new management and reporting capabilities to help manufacturers identify and assess the compliance status of products containing the regulated minerals of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold and their many derivatives. This allows companies to effectively protect their corporate brands, mitigate risk of non-compliance with government regulations and customer requirements, and avoid possible fines and penalties.

To further assist manufacturers with their quality initiatives, PTC has enhanced how Windchill analyzes the latest product structure information to provide early and accurate insight into product reliability. For example, critical-to-quality characteristics identified in Creo are automatically communicated to Windchill Quality™ offerings for risk and reliability analysis, associating these characteristics with the test plans and manufacturing controls designed to ensure their quality. A new Windchill Customer Experience Management™ module provides a highly-structured and automated process flow to trace and respond to customer complaints about product quality. This enables a company to consistently resolve quality issues in a manner compliant with government regulations or quality management standards.

PTC has also enhanced how companies can accurately track product cost estimates and maintain related historical information by managing and displaying product cost information in multiple currencies.

Get More: Windchill Goes Mobile

With the new release, PTC is introducing a new Windchill Mobile app, giving users instant “anytime, anywhere” access to current product and process information. Windchill Mobile includes an innovative “shake and break” capability that allows users to explode a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail. This helps companies improve worker productivity, regardless of whether they’re on the road, the manufacturing floor, or visiting a customer. Windchill Mobile is available today to download from the Apple iTunes store for both the iPad and iPhone. Windchill also now supports Apple users even if they aren’t on a mobile device with support for Mac OS X.

PTC has also simplified the Windchill system administration tools to improve reliability and lower overhead associated with running a Windchill installation. For example, the new PTC System Monitor continuously checks the Windchill production environment to give administrators greater visibility into system performance, allowing proactive detection of potential bottlenecks before they impact end users, and reducing time to repair.

Finally, Windchill continues to build on the dramatic improvements PTC introduced in its user experience, making great use of graphical information and further simplifying workflows to accelerate tasks. For example, the new Relationship Explorer allows users to visually navigate between related parts, documents, CAD designs, requirements, and change objects. This allows users to quickly navigate across product structures to find the information they need.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

Availability

The Windchill capabilities described above are available now, with the exception of integration with Integrity (available in early May 2012), FlexPLM (available in May 2012) and Windchill Quality offerings (available in July 2012). The timing of any of these remaining product releases, and any features or functionality thereof, are subject to change at PTC’s discretion. Active maintenance customers can download the release from the software downloads page on www.ptc.com.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service. PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks. Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide. More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

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PTC, Windchill, Windchill Quality, Windchill Mobile, Windchill Customer Experience Management, Creo, Creo Options Modeler, FlexPLM, and Integrity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

1 CIMdata, 2011 PLM Industry Review and Trends Report

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