Early Adopter Anticipates Increased Efficiencies & Quality Improvements from PTC’s SharePoint®-Based Solution for Product Development
The Product Development Company®, today announced the availability of Windchill® ProductPoint®.
First announced at the PTC/USER World Event in June, 2008, Windchill ProductPoint offers an easy to learn, quick to deploy solution for sharing CAD and other structured data among teams.
Windchill ProductPoint provides an opportunity for smaller companies to experience the benefits of product lifecycle management (PLM) without a large investment while also giving companies with an active SharePoint® strategy the flexibility to extend their product development system to broader user communities.
Hess Services, Inc., headquartered in Hays, Kansas, understands the product development challenges facing many small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Founded in 1989 as an industrial and petroleum equipment refurbishing company, Hess Services, has grown to over 140 employees and offers design and manufacturing services for oil well servicing rigs, petroleum surface production equipment, and steel and fiberglass tanks.
Pro/ENGINEER® technology to support growth
Like many small companies, Hess Services lacked the technology infrastructure to support the company’s growth, tripling in size during the past 3 years with an 82% growth in annual revenue from 2007-2008. As a first step to resolve this challenge, the company standardised on PTC Pro/ENGINEER® to provide the scaleable, powerful design capabilities it needed to handle large, complex assemblies consisting of more than 3000 components.
The use of Pro/ENGINEER has reduced production costs by as much as 30% due to eliminated rework. It has also helped optimise product development by streamlining the design review process, making it easier to communicate design changes to customers.
In order to support its business initiatives for expansion into new markets, Hess Services is pursuing ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) pressure vessel certification, which requires the demonstration of a document control system. The company recognised that its current system, based upon the use of pdf files and shared network folders, was inefficient and prone to errors – impacting quality, productivity and costs.
To accomplish its objectives, Hess Services needed a solution that would enable its design teams to share and revise product information without overwriting each other’s work, provide version control and offer the capabilities to search and reuse product development information. After a thorough evaluation of available solutions, Hess Services chose Windchill ProductPoint as its entry point to product lifecycle management.
Windchill solves collaboration issues
Windchill ProductPoint represents the combination of the Microsoft® SharePoint social computing platform with PTC’s expertise in product development, essentially making social product development an easily accessible reality. In that vein, Windchill ProductPoint helps teams to connect to each other in a variety of ways including:- instant access to colleagues via presence detection,
- personalisation of workspaces to organise relevant content, and
- the sharing of rich product information throughout the company and with their customers.
- Quick search and find for the latest versions of the right files, driving greater team productivity
- Extend access to engineering content throughout the company, enabling more reuse and better decision-making
- Foster timely information sharing among team members through the use of the SharePoint Web 2.0 social computing capabilities such as blogs, wikis, and on-line presence detection
- Begin using quickly with a fast and easy deployment on top of an existing or new SharePoint Server, reducing total cost of ownership
- Adopt with a minimal learning curve, due to the familiar user interface and integrated environment
Windchill ProductPoint Availability
Windchill ProductPoint began shipping in December 2008. Click for more information about Windchill ProductPoint.*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.