China's rapidly expanding global economy brings both opportunities and challenges for Chinese telecom manufacturers. In order to compete in today's business environment and become an international manufacturing center with world-class brands, ZTE focuses on independent innovation. Independent innovation is a Chinese government launched campaign to create higher value-added home-grown products, services, and technologies. ZTE is also highly committed to research and development, with 78% of the company's workforce dedicated to R&D initiatives and around 10% of annual revenues channeled to this field. Furthermore, ZTE has set up 16 R&D centers and institutes across the U.S., India, and Sweden, demonstrating its leading role in the global telecom equipment market.
ZTE has used PTC's Pro/ENGINEER® and Windchill® Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software since 1998 to improve design and collaboration efficiencies. After their product design process had been greatly enhanced, ZTE encountered new problems around product documentation management. Even though ZTE has 200 document engineers responsible for product documentation, it struggled with creating timely manufacturing development documents and with providing customers with up-to-date, personalized product usage instructions. Also, ZTE was unable to properly leverage a large amount of its historical documentation because its legacy system made it difficult to identify and retrieve data and because ZTE had a manual process for updating product documents. Even though ZTE dedicated a significant effort to update product documents, all these problems still impacted customer satisfaction and new product time-to-market.
Ultimately, ZTE realized that a complete product document management system could help to solve these problems. After a thorough analysis of offerings in the market, ZTE again selected to work with PTC to implement PTC’s dynamic publishing solutions, including Arbortext Editor™, Arbortext Styler™, Arbortext Architect™, Arbortext Publish Engine™ and Arbortext Content Manager™. In addition to enabling ZTE to move its product document publishing processes from a desktop operating system to PTC’s dynamic publishing solution, Arbortext solutions also help ZTE meet its requirements for document content management and modification, ensuring that all publishing content comes from only one, reliable data source. By implementing PTC solutions, ZTE has increased the efficiency of its product document engineers, and is able to ensure that all data sources can be entered and modified simultaneously by multiple people. This has improved the document publishing process, increasing the consistency between document quality and document publication. Moreover, Arbortext solutions have enabled ZTE to automate publications’ formatting and sending process, significantly improving the update speed of the product data documents and publications.
“We selected Arbortext Dynamic Publishing solutions to help us to reduce and even eliminate the product document management gap between us and large-scale, international leading companies like Nokia and Nortel,” said Chen Jian Zhou, Dean of ZTE University. “The addition of Arbortext to our existing implementation of PTC products, creates a single system for product development that is able to provide ZTE with the highest levels of efficiency and reuse and ultimately a distinct advantage over our competitors.”
“PTC solutions for dynamic publishing are designed for enterprise document management and publishing. In addition to improving the existing document generation processes, including technological documentation processes, modification processes and organization building processes, these solutions also enable the availability of enterprise requirements, process management, dynamic publishing and planning systems, to maximize document value by creating documents in the form of XML,” said Chad Hawkinson, vice president of vertical market strategy, PTC. “PTC is very pleased to provide services for a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions like ZTE, and we look forward to remaining a long-term strategic partner with ZTE.”
About ZTE
Founded in 1985, ZTE has been traded in Shenzhen Stock Exchange since
1997. In December 2004, as the first China mainland enterprise, ZTE was
successfully listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange in Hong
Kong. According to Hong Kong accounting regulations, in 2007 ZTE
achieved operating revenue of 34 billion yuan, 57.8% of it from overseas
markets. With strong business performance in the global market, ZTE was
the only Chinese telecoms manufacturer being awarded China’s
Top 10 overseas-listed companies by U.S. Business Week. As a leading
global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions,
ZTE is one of the fastest growing companies of communication solutions
in recent years. For more information on ZTE, please visit
http:// www.zte.com.cn .
