Improved Efficiency in Managing Engineering and Manufacturing Bills of Materials Will Enable Sinfonia Technology to Accelerate its Digital Transformation

BOSTON — (BUSINESS WIRE) — June 17, 2018 — PTC (NASDAQ: PTC) today announced from the sold-out LiveWorx^® 18 digital transformation conference that Sinfonia Technology Co., Ltd., has selected the PTC Windchill^® product lifecycle management (PLM) solution to improve operational efficiency, time-to-market, quality, and team collaboration at its Clean Transport Equipment Factory at its Toyohashi facility.

Established in 1917, Sinfonia is a major industrial equipment manufacturer that focuses on semiconductors, aerospace, automobiles, and medical devices. The Clean Transport Equipment Factory that will implement Windchill manufactures load parts, or in-process transport equipment, used in semiconductor manufacturing equipment, equipment front-end modules (EFEM) and vacuum platform. It is the world's top load parts producer delivering load parts to major equipment manufacturers worldwide.

As demand for semiconductor devices increases worldwide, Sinfonia’s implementation of Windchill will enable the company to streamline the design of standard products that account for 90 percent of its sales, quickly develop new products, and accelerate bill of materials (BOM) transformation between engineering and manufacturing.

“Enabling digital transformation for the Japanese market – in particular, the high-tech industry – has been a major focus for PTC. We’re excited to be working with Sinfonia as they continue their transformation journey,” said Kevin Wrenn, divisional general manager, PLM Segment, PTC. “The switch that Sinfonia made from Aras to Windchill reflects a trend that we have been noticing: companies are increasingly favoring scalable, out-of-the-box solutions versus the tool-kit approaches that our competitors offer.”

Finding the Right Solution
Historically, Sinfonia created manual BOMs in its design support and drawing release processes. These processes were time-consuming due to manual entries. They were also error-prone, as the BOMs, 2D drawings, and 3D models were not linked, causing updates to be overlooked and leading to a significant amount of time searching for information in the change management systems. Also, the data was not centrally managed, and the ways in which teams worked and shared information was inefficient, inhibiting workload balancing and flexible resource assignments.

To solve these issues and to efficiently manage its EBOM and MBOM process flow, Sinfonia invested in Aras Innovator as its PLM solution and SAP for ERP. However, Aras was unable to support requirements from Sinfonia’s Clean Transport Equipment group and required extensive customization, preventing Sinfonia from going live as scheduled. The Sinfonia team began looking for a replacement solution that would enable them to transform their processes and implement an easy-to use system for their design engineers. The team at the Clean Transport Equipment plant decided to switch the PLM system to Windchill as they were confident it would enable design engineers to easily access the functionality and product data they need.

“The semi-conductor industry is entering what is called a ‘supercycle’ that the industry has never experienced before,” said Atsushi Hanaki, officer, Clean Transport Equipment Works, Electrical Products & Systems Division, Sinfonia Technology. “We need to perform engineering work to enhance existing high-demand products, as well as drive new development projects in parallel. Our organization was also expected by the company to improve profitability so that we can reach our mid-range business goals. While we expected that implementing a new system in a rapidly growing business environment would create a significant initial workload at Design Engineering and Production Engineering, we believed we had to do this as one of the actions we planned to reach our goals and decided to implement Windchill. After seeing a demo of Windchill, our Engineering team said, ‘We definitely want it.’ Their eager reaction made our decision to choose Windchill easy.”

Sinfonia has already completed the first phase of its rollout of Windchill and will soon expand its use of the products to include other modules, as well as connect Windchill to SAP. Its future roadmap for digital transformation includes improving field service operations with smart, connected products and services, as well as augmented reality.

Additional Resources

• PLM for Your Digital Engineering Journey
• Windchill product page
• Register for the LiveWorx 18 livestream

The announcement of any particular selection of PTC software is not necessarily indicative of the timing of recognition of revenue therefrom or the amount of revenue for any particular period. In addition, in many cases the software must be successfully implemented and deployed to enable the customer to achieve its business objectives. The announcement of a customer’s selection or planned future selection of PTC software does not indicate that applicable implementation and deployment activities are complete or that additional software will be purchased.