PTC is proud to reveal that over the past year, more than a dozen of its valued FlexPLM customers have had their existing implementations upgraded to the latest release – at a low, inclusive cost that covers software and professional services.
Developed in partnership with experienced implementers ITC, a new, agile upgrade approach – supported by heightened standards of technical excellence – has enabled the project time and cost of FlexPLM upgrades to fall dramatically. In a matter of weeks, an enterprise-grade implementation of a previous generation of FlexPLM can now be converted to FlexPLM Version 11, including a move from on-premise hosting to the cloud. This timeline has been road-tested and verified more than a dozen times in the last year by PTC and ITC teams working with large, Tier 1 retailers and brands with multi-category products, whose complex business processes and supply chains are spread across multiple different continents.
“We were impressed by the speed we were able to move to the latest generation of FlexPLM, as well as the low cost of upgrading from one milestone version to another,” explained Bhavin Parikh, Senior Application Manager for long-time FlexPLM customer QVC. “Together, the technical progress that PTC has made in update automation, and the agile methodology put together by ITC, enabled a highly efficient, quick and cost-effective upgrade.”
At the same time as lowering total cost of ownership, the new upgrade approach also provides an immediate path to all the documented capabilities and benefits of the latest version of PTC’s FlexPLM solution, including:
- Accelerating time to market by up to 45%
- Improving margins by up to 10%
- Improving sales conversion rates by up to 30%
- Reducing sample costs by up to 35%
To make sure that these benefits are available to everyone, these upgrades also included extensive User Acceptance Testing (or UAT,) encouraging PLM adoption from initial concept design to manufacturing.
“The early results of this new upgrade program are incredible,” said Bill Brewster, Senior Vice President and General Manager of PTC’s Retail Business Unit. “Over the past 12 months we have helped loyal customers, many of them with thousands of PLM users in-house and throughout the extended supply chain, to keep everything they love about working in FlexPLM, and also take confident, cost-effective, next steps on their digital transformation journey. I am excited that today, with minimal disruption, long-term PTC customers (including some of the world’s largest brands and retailers) can access the latest and greatest innovations in FlexPLM and from across our Retail Innovation Platform: industry-changing technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, the revolutionary Material Exchange, and open-standards 3D.”
Key to PTC’s new upgrade program is the ThingWorx Retail Connector, which allows an endless variety of business systems and solutions to be quickly integrated to FlexPLM, eliminating expensive customization work. Combined with a team of industry professionals who specialize in helping customers get the most from their FlexPLM solution, this new innovation will allow PTC to maintain and even accelerate the pace of upgrades in 2019 and beyond.
“The remarkable results of this upgrade program would not have been possible without our team’s extensive knowledge of FlexPLM and PTC’s constant pursuit of technical innovation,” said Yadvinder Changotra, Global Practice Head – Retail PLM & IoT Solutions, at ITC Infotech. “Working together, we have built a scalable model for low-cost, no-compromise upgrades that can be implemented by trusted consultants anywhere around the world.”
