CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

23 June 2008

Implementation Investments

Wrightbus Brings Advanced Vehicle Designs to Market with the PTC® Product Development System

PTC 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 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.”

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