CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 February 2013
Product News
PTC Empowers Small Businesses to Streamline Product Data Management
PTC® today announced PTC Windchill® PDM Essentials™, a product data management (PDM) solution for the small business market. The new offering, which will be sold exclusively through PTC’s channel partners worldwide, takes PTC’s product lifecycle management (PLM) software and “right sizes” it for use by small manufacturers.
The need has never been greater. In the U.S. alone, 99 percent of all manufacturing companies employ fewer than 500 people. They account for over half the total value of U.S. production and employ nearly 12 million people.1 They also face the same challenges as larger companies: the complexity of bringing products to market and the need to continually innovate. Yet, while large manufacturers have long relied on enterprise-class PLM solutions to help coordinate strategy and planning activities related to product development, small businesses have often shied away from adopting such solutions due to perceived deployment complexity. With this offering, PTC removes those barriers to adoption, and has enabled its channel partners exclusively to meet this growing market demand.
“Without doubt, small manufacturers have some of the same need for industrial strength product data management tools as the big guys,” said Thane Hathaway, CEO EAC. “That said, they don’t always have the same level of IT infrastructure to support such tools. PTC Windchill PDM Essentials gives them just what they need to securely and efficiently share and manage product information.”
PTC has taken the strengths of its enterprise PLM solution and created a “right sized” package for small companies. PTC Windchill PDM Essentials is easy to deploy, containing everything a customer needs to get up and running – including a Microsoft SQL Server database – in one easy-to-install package.
“We’ve heard from many smaller customers that while they like the look and capabilities of PTC Windchill 10.0, they need a solution more tailored to their smaller infrastructure,” said Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice President, PLM, ALM & SCM segments, PTC. “With PTC Windchill PDM Essentials, we are now offering small companies what they need for CAD data management - a simple way to securely manage all CAD documents and ensure data integrity.”
This offering also helps companies scale business and product development activities to ensure repeatability. For example, rudimentary processes may be sufficient if there are only a few people involved in product development. But as a company grows, a lack of defined, scalable processes can cause confusion and chaos. PTC Windchill PDM Essentials allows customers to enable simple controls and processes to help make everyone more efficient. This helps keep costs low and output high, while maintaining flexibility and adaptability, and maximizing ROI.
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