Product Innovation Winner Implements PTC Windchill® and Pro/ENGINEER® to improve time-to-market and product development processes

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today announced that Wrightbus, the UK manufacturing division of Wright Group and one of Europe’s leading providers of passenger transport solutions, has adopted Windchill® for product lifecycle management (PLM). Windchill, the PTC content and process management solution, has enabled Wrightbus to significantly improve its collaborative product development processes. Wrightbus has been a user of PTC’s integrated CAD/CAM/CAE solution, Pro/ENGINEER® since 2000, and the selection of Windchill provides Wrightbus with the additional benefits of the PTC integral Product Development System (PDS) strengthening the business processes that keep this innovative and award winning company ahead of its global competition.

“We believe that Wrightbus is the most innovative supplier in the market,” said Martin Graham, director of IT and logistics, Wrightbus. “In order to maintain that position we recognized that our engineering processes needed to become a seamless part of the overall business process. By adopting Windchill as our common product information management platform we are now able to synchronize all our internal processes and our aim is to eliminate 50 percent of non-value-add activities in engineering.”

Established in 1946 and based in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Wrightbus is still a family owned and managed company. A pioneer of low-floor buses in the UK, Wrightbus is renowned for producing vehicles that are stylish, durable, of the highest quality and with innovative features – such as their hybrid diesel-electric vehicle which won the Renishaw Award for Product Innovation in 2007. With a growing customer base, which has expanded into Central Europe and the US, the company recognized that the existing product development processes couldn’t sustain further growth. Therefore, Wrightbus initiated a program to improve product development and manufacturing processes.

Wrightbus has established Windchill as its PLM platform to satisfy its needs of improving product structure management, change management and work flow control. This in turn has enabled the release of product structure data to the production system using an optimized process flow and provided accurate data release from the PLM to the ERP system.

“PTC is committed to helping companies create competitive advantage by optimizing processes and eliminating redundancies in order to reduce time-to-market and costs,” said Joshua Fredberg, vice president, product and market strategy, PTC. “Wrightbus highlights the momentum of PLM as a critical area of investment in business innovation as market leaders strive to increase operational efficiency and maximize productivity in product development.”

About The Wright Group

The Wright Group is one of Europe’s leading independently-owned bus manufacturers. Today the company employs more than 1,000 people at its manufacturing and HQ facility at Galgorm, near Ballymena in County Antrim where they currently output 20-25 buses per week.

As well as pioneering the accessible bus in the UK in the early 1990’s and growing rapidly to become the market leading designers and manufacturers of public transport vehicles in the British Isles, The Wright Group has also enjoyed considerable success in many export markets, including USA, Europe and Asia / Pacific.

About PTC Solutions for the Automotive Industry

PTC solutions for automotive are designed to meet the product design and product life cycle management needs of both OEMs and suppliers in the automotive industry. PTC provides 3D design, product data management and collaboration solutions to over 1400 automotive manufacturers including 8 of the top ten suppliers and 3 of the top 5 OEMs.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 50,000 organizations worldwide. PTC customers include the world's most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries. PTC is included in the S&P Midcap 400 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit http://www.ptc.com.

Except for the historical information contained herein, matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These include: the success of our initiatives to provide a robust and easily deployable solution for the exchange of product and complementary manufacturing and supply chain-related information between our Windchill solutions and ERP, CRM, and SCM systems; the ability of PTC to successfully partner and effectively coordinate and manage joint activities (including development, implementation and support) with technology partners in order to efficiently and cost effectively deliver products and services that meet our customer’s data exchange requirements, and the success of PTC’s customer satisfaction initiatives in providing the foundation for long-term relationships and repeat business, together with such other risks and uncertainties as are detailed from time to time in reports filed by PTC with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including PTC's most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. The announcement of any particular deployment of PTC software is not necessarily indicative of the timing of recognition of revenue therefrom or the level of revenue for any particular period.

PTC and its logo, The Product Development Company, Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill and all PTC product names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries.