PTC(R) Global Services Helps First Automotive Works Optimize Its Commercial Vehicle Digital Design Process
Resulted in More Efficient Design Flow and Standardized Product Data Management
As a result of the company's positive experience with PTC products, the FAW Technology Center turned to PTC Global Services to restructure their disaggregated product development process. Over the years, the FAW Technology Center's Commercial Vehicle Department deployed disparate software platforms from multiple vendors. Unfortunately, this resulted in a fragmented digital product data management system that left the product development process and the digital design and verification process disconnected. Additionally, inadequate digital design standards caused the product data to differ from one system to another, ultimately leading to unnecessary delays in product development.
PTC offered a unique combination of PLM expertise as well as proficiency in automotive industry process consulting. As a result, they quickly identified problem areas and developed best practices that enabled the FAW Technology Center's Commercial Vehicle Department to achieve breakthrough product development performance.
Through close cooperation with FAW Technology Center's Commercial Vehicle Department, PTC defined a standardized top-down design flow and an effective collaborative work flow between various engineering teams. To reduce inconsistent product data caused by multiple platforms, Pro/ENGINEER was used as the exclusive 3D design platform for all vehicle design, including parts and components. Pro/ENGINEER was also used for engineering drafting and printing, ensuring a consistent process and seamless data integration from design to printout. All product design data was also centrally managed and accessed via the PTC Pro/INTRALINK(R) workgroup management solution, enabling engineers to easily and efficiently retrieve the most updated Pro/ENGINEER data for verification.
The consultants from PTC also developed an R&D process for the Commercial Vehicle Department's new products, including the design of general parts and electricity/pipeline design, so that future processes are standardized and clearly understood by engineers. The new digital design and verification process is being rolled out across all vehicle models, ensuring adoption and value realization on a large scale.
FAW Technology Center began to experience benefits immediately. "The newly integrated design flow provides for both correlation and consistency in our product design, greatly facilitating the collaborative design of the project team and increasing probability of achieving success at the first try," said Mr. Xulong Jin, director of R&D, Commercial Vehicle Department, FAW Technology Center. "After adopting PTC's recommendations, we were able to optimize use of our digital product data across all product design units. The new development process recommended by PTC sets a good example to the entire FAW Technology Center in terms of its standardized process and lays a sound foundation for shortening the R&D cycle of our products."
"Technology alone cannot optimize complex enterprise processes," said Barry Cohen, Ph.D., executive vice president, strategic services and partners, PTC. "Technology represents potential value to a customer. To help customers realize the potential of that value, PTC must be a true solutions provider, delivering best-in-class software and services. By tapping into our in-depth knowledge of the automotive industry and through more that 20 years of product development experience, we are able to partner with forward-thinking customers like FAW Technology Center to achieve outstanding results that deliver competitive advantage and long-lasting business value."
About FAW Group Corporation
China First Automotive Works Group Corporation, commonly referred to as FAW, set up its first factory on July 15, 1953. Now, FAW has 29 wholly-owned subsidiary companies and 14 share holding subsidiary companies. Among them, there are three listed companies (namely "FAW Motor", "FAW Xiali" and "FAW Sichuan") and one technology center capable of product development technology material R&D for the domestic automobile industry. The FAW group has cumulatively produced and sold over 5 million units of medium, heavy and light-duty vehicles as well as various types of cars and minibuses. Their asset total more than RMB80 billion yuan, and registers an annual turnover approaching US$15 billion. FAW employs a total of 126,000 staff.
The FAW Technology Center is the earliest and the largest product R&D and test/inspection base of the Chinese automobile industry. It assumes the design and R&D of FAW's main products lines and is well-endowed with a first-class R&D center. The FAW Technology Center is staffed with over 1,800 technical personnel. It adopts fully electronic design and is equipped with imported road simulation vibration test stand, collision test room and styling simulation platform. It has become an R&D organization rich in human resources and advanced in equipment within the Chinese automobile industry.
About PTC Solutions for the Automotive Industry
PTC solutions for automotive are designed to meet the product design and product life cycle management needs of both OEMs and suppliers in the automotive industry. PTC provides 3D design, product data management and collaboration solutions to over 1400 automotive manufacturers including 8 of the top ten suppliers and 3 of the top 5 OEMs.
About PTC
PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 40,000 companies worldwide. PTC customers include the world's most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries. PTC is included in the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit http://www.ptc.com.
Except for the historical information contained herein, matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks and uncertainties include PTC's ability to successfully work across a diversified and expanded user base to implement and support products and services that meet evolving customer requirements, the ability of PTC to develop the technologies necessary to deliver products and services that meet evolving customer requirements, the success of PTC's customer satisfaction initiatives in providing the foundation for long-term relationships and repeat business, together with such other risks and uncertainties as are detailed from time to time in reports filed by PTC with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including PTC's most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. The announcement of any particular software implementation is not necessarily indicative of the timing of recognition of revenue therefrom or the level of revenue for any particular period.
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