BigLever Software announced today that the company has established a partnership with Method Park, the German expert in software and systems engineering and process management solutions. By combining BigLever's industry-standard Gears PLE solution, new generation PLE methods and deployment expertise with Method Park's in-depth process management expertise and tools, the companies will enable mutual customers to realize the order-of-magnitude efficiency, productivity and time-to-market gains delivered by PLE.
"As German manufacturers in automotive and other industries are challenged to deliver highly sophisticated products with ever-greater feature diversity, they are looking for ways to dramatically reduce engineering and operational complexity," said Dr. Charles Krueger, BigLever Software CEO. "This has resulted in rapidly growing demand for a new paradigm of variation and complexity management. PLE has emerged to fill this need. BigLever is excited to join forces with Method Park to bring the latest PLE innovations to the German market."
"Customers will profit from the cooperation between BigLever and Method Park tremendously," said Bernd Hindel, CEO, Method Park. "With this partnership we bundle up our know-how and our solutions for all challenges of Product Line Engineering, which enables us to support our customers even more efficiently and faster with the gradual introduction of a systematic variant management."
PLE addresses the problems of product complexity and variant management by dramatically simplifying the creation, delivery, maintenance, and evolution of a product line portfolio. BigLever's Gears PLE solution enables a unified variation management approach across the full engineering and operations lifecycle using automated, feature-based production and engineering asset sharing. Method Park's Stages Process Management Suite and variant management process consulting services enables organizations to model the associated PLE processes for automated PLE workflow.
The BigLever / Method Park partnership will allow the companies to combine these capabilities and areas of expertise to help customers improve cross-functional communication and collaboration, break down organizational silos, and more effectively manage product variation – from product line portfolio planning to engineering, manufacturing, sales, and maintenance.
