Hess Services, Inc., headquartered in Hays, Kansas, understands the product development challenges facing many small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). Founded in 1989 as an industrial and petroleum equipment refurbishing company, Hess Services, has grown to over 140 employees and offers design and manufacturing services for oil well servicing rigs, petroleum surface production equipment, and steel and fiberglass tanks. Like many small companies, Hess Services lacked the technology infrastructure to support the company’s growth, tripling in size during the past three years with an 82% growth in annual revenue from 2007-2008. As a first step to resolve this challenge, the company standardized on PTC Pro/ENGINEER® to provide the scalable, powerful design capabilities it needed to handle large, complex assemblies consisting of more than 3,000 components. The use of Pro/ENGINEER has reduced production costs by as much as 30% due to eliminated rework. It has also helped optimize product development by streamlining the design review process, making it easier to communicate design changes to customers.
In order to support its business initiatives for expansion into new markets, Hess Services is pursuing ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) pressure vessel certification, which requires the demonstration of a document control system. The company recognized that its current system, based upon the use of pdf files and shared network folders, was inefficient and prone to errors - impacting quality, productivity and costs. To accomplish its objectives, Hess Services needed a solution that would enable its design teams to share and revise product information without overwriting each other’s work, provide version control and offer the capabilities to search and reuse product development information. After a thorough evaluation of available solutions, Hess Services chose Windchill ProductPoint as its entry point to product lifecycle management.
Windchill ProductPoint represents the combination of the Microsoft® SharePoint social computing platform with PTC’s expertise in product development, essentially making social product development an easily accessible reality. In that vein, Windchill ProductPoint helps teams to connect to each other in a variety of ways including:
- Instant access to colleagues via presence detection
- Personalization of workspaces to organize relevant content
- The sharing of rich product information throughout the company and with their customers
Windchill ProductPoint provides key benefits including:
- Quick search and find for the latest versions of the right files, driving greater team productivity
- Extend access to engineering content throughout the company, enabling more reuse and better decision-making
- Foster timely information sharing among team members through the use of the SharePoint Web 2.0 social computing capabilities such as blogs, wikis, and on-line presence detection
- Begin using quickly with a fast and easy deployment on top of an existing or new SharePoint Server, reducing total cost of ownership
- Adopt with a minimal learning curve, due to the familiar user interface and integrated environment
“Windchill ProductPoint solves a major dilemma for us - Hess Services has outgrown the use of pdf files and shared folders for collaboration and file versioning,” said Nick Jensen, chief engineer, Hess Services, Inc. “Windchill ProductPoint offers us a ‘right-sized’ PLM solution that can be quickly and easily deployed on our SharePoint platform and will provide immediate value for our product development team by increasing productivity, efficiency and quality.”
“Windchill ProductPoint meets the PLM needs of small and medium-size companies like Hess Services, and complements existing Windchill deployments for companies of any size that are seeking to extend their product development system to a broader audience,” said James Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer, PTC. “PTC’s goal is to enable companies of all sizes to leverage their technology investments and successfully execute critical product development initiatives.”
Windchill ProductPoint Availability
Windchill ProductPoint began shipping in December 2008. For more information about Windchill ProductPoint, please visit http://www.ptc.com/go/windchillproductpoint.
*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.
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