Employee Newsletter March 2018

March has crept up on us and, with it, our internal newsletter. This edition is filled with updates and all the latest company information. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and I hope to receive contributions from those who haven’t for future editions.

Thank you for taking the time to read this update. If you have any feedback, please share it with me. I want to make this newsletter as useful and engaging as possible.

Marketing Updates

Last month I shared the news that we’re working with TSM to produce some collateral, focusing their use of PTC Thingworx. Everything is now in place for a feature in Silicon Republic within the next month. I have read the article and it tells a really nice story. PTC will also be doing their own press release along the same lines as the article. There are at least two other publications that will feature the story, following a press day due mid-March. We also have the video case study due to be recorded at the end of March. I will be sure to share everything will you as and when the assets are released.
The webinar programme is going from strength to strength, with our recent MathCAD session getting more sign-ups that any other webinar to date. Well done everyone. Our next webinar is our Creo 5.0 Sneak Peak on the 21st March 12:30 – 1pm. Let’s make this our new record breaker.
Related to this, all webinar registrants are recorded in CRM. Some still need contacting from our January and February webinars. Let’s speak to these people and see what we can sell!
I’m trying to get our case studies and customer testimonials updated on our website as some of them are outdated. If you are talking to a customer who you know are big fans of us and the software, feel free to ask the question and I can get them on my prospective case studies list. I have a couple that I’m working on this month. I’ll send a further update when these are ready to be shared.
We’ve received some excellent customer feedback recently from CC Hydrosonic, thanking Aida for all of her hard work, and from Lifescan Scotland, who praises John and everyone on support for their quick and efficient response to all their support calls since they reactivated. Really well done everybody. It’s always great to receive positive customer feedback.

PTC and managing our relationship with them

The acronym PTC has had many meanings over the years, but I think “prepare to change” is one that holds true. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad connotation. The change and development in their product portfolio over the years has brought great opportunity to us all. That said, some of the changes go somewhat unnoticed and then crop up and give us surprises. You may have seen some of the operational changes over the past while, with training delivery, PiFF system, order process etc etc and we are due more. PTC are embarking on a “one contract” strategy, which should bring benefits for us in terms of operations etc. The details are due to be shared and rolled out in the coming weeks / months. I will keep all updated. I know each of you interface with PTC with your own roles on a daily / weekly basis and Julian, Nick and I on an operational and contractual basis. We have a formal quarterly review with PTC and I speak with Jakov weekly on various issues. If you are not getting what you think you should get from your PTC counterpart, flag it up rather than persist with the issues. We can then review from the top down.

Lessons Learned

Customer complaints and operational issues are a standard part of doing business, so I never see a customer complaint as a problem, as such. Dealt with in the right way, they are opportunities for us to learn and improve individually and as a company. Laura and Emily are working on developing a formal customer care program, which will help us identify any customer dissatisfaction early on and, hopefully, allow us to rectify issues easily and with less disruption.

We have had a number of accounts over the past few months where our engagement could be better - or at least it seems that way. To try and identify why this is happening, Nick, Julian and I are doing an initial review of these accounts and will try to highlight what we believe is contributing to the issues. We will then circle back with each department etc to solicit input. Ultimately we will try to identify what is contributing to the issues over the past number of months and then put some training / development in place accordingly. Please mail Nick, Julian, Karen or I with any ideas.

Social & Charity activity

I see a social event has crept into this month’s newsletter and, surprisingly enough, it is a cycle event! We are keen to give everyone a chance to get involved in something of interest to them, so this event is just to get the wheels turning as it were. I know there are various interests in the company around sport & leisure and it is a great opportunity to arrange an event, get out and get active - and maybe raise a few bob for charity. The company has donated a good few quid to various causes over the past couple of years and it would be good to continue. Talk to Emily about any ideas you have and we will see how best to support and develop them.

Finally, I mentioned in my last mail that all of us can influence the success of the company hitting targets and with one month left in the Q, let's have a big push to start the year off as a quarter hitting targets.

Inside Sale – Luke

I have been off to the PTC office in Barcelona for the Creo Sales and Product training. The feedback from this was really good and the week was valuable. All collateral from the week is being digested internally and will be distributed in due course.

While in Barcelona, I also caught up with the HVS Team / High Velocity Sales. For those who don’t know, these are the equivalent of PTC Inside Sales whose focus is to find and qualify leads for PTC products and pass to local partners to move forward to close, as well as assisting with calling current customers to help push offers / webinar and so on. There seems to be a lot more we could be doing to align with them, gain more leads and drive more business. We are putting together a formalised plan for this which is due to be shared.
One thing we can start with, that will be included within the plan, is making more use of the PTC resource, ‘Coffee with a CAD Expert’. https://www.ptc.com/en/products/cad/coffee-with-an-expert . For sales, there will be further information released on how we can use this, within the next week so keep an eye on your emails.

Presales – Phil

Strategic Activities

FT – Phil Supporting Services Rollout as Technical Account Manager (TAM)
Other TAM Activities being managed by Andrew include Finning, Denso, RE Thompson,
Adam leading development of CAD Standards Deliverable messaging (with Lee) which we hope to be rolling out for use in future opportunities.

Presales Tracking

We are putting some work into refining our use of the tracking spreadsheet, which is used for tracking all Presales activities. This should help improve our prioritisation and organisation in the future.
We will be performing ‘Priority’ reviews with Sales to help us focus our efforts within the right opportunities.
We are looking in the future to have all our tracking and review information in CRM. Updates on this progress will be given in due course.
Remember, any Presales activity you assign must contain some background information of the opportunity, objectives of the task, next steps following completion and a date required – this is a big step towards improving our internal communication.

Technical Engagements

CAD – Adam leading on more of these engagements
IOT – Andrew engaged in support of these engagements and we are finding he is getting busy in UK and Ireland
PLM – Adrian, Phil and Andrew been involved in ongoing and new engagements including Gresham, Wave Optics, Megger, Roxel Change Management

Team

Adam focused on Inside Sales and Desktop presales support and coordination
Andrew focused on PLM, IOT Topics, also supporting Adam in transition to Desktop Lead
Adrian re-engaged following services engagement with Cook in Ireland
Phil engaged on various PLM projects and supporting the team on Business Messaging

The Services Team have had a very busy month, so I will share just some of the highlights.

Training:

John B and James had a nice jolly up to sunny Barrow in Furness to deliver some Creo Simulate and Update to Creo 4 from 2 training to BAE for a week each. Meanwhile Matt and Atif jointly delivered a Creo Illustrate course their first time to De Beers. It is always good to see the skill sets expanding within the new team members and receiving positive feedback from the customer.
Although Adam is busy settling into his new Pre-Sales roles, there is still the need for him to deliver some training for the Services Team, while our skill set is continually growing. Adam recently completed a set of six half day consultancy workshops on a variety of Creo topics for Polaris spanning over three months. He also delivered a couple of MathCAD courses, so a big thanks to Adam for his continued support in Services.
We have an exciting Windchill and CAM project kicking off at Meggitt shortly, so John B is busy prepping for Milling and Turning training delivery.
I am very grateful to Heather for her continued support with the administration of training until our Services Delivery Administrator is up to speed.

Consultancy:

Dave and Phil have been doing some great work in FT Technologies with our first full scale PLM project. They are generating some nice templates and working practices which we will be able to reuse on future PLM projects. We are now at the stage of configuring the system following some very intense workshops with the customer over the past couple of months. So great progress and a happy customer.
Aida is proving to be a great addition to the Windchill team and is currently leading four Windchill projects, so well done Aida.
Chris is running some big projects in parallel and has successfully completed a Windchill upgrade at Enersys. The refreshed delivery process and templates that Chris had a big input into are proving very successful in our project delivery, so some nice work there.
James has been busy delivering FEA and Simulate training, helping out on Support and delivering a challenging project at Anaconda. With each of these challenges we face, we will be following up with lessons learned and a feedback loop. This is all part of our continuous process improvement.

Support

Heather has settled into in her new role in Support and is doing a great job of resolving Creo issues.
John has had a particularly busy month for Windchill support calls which is keeping him very occupied. There will shortly be an analysis of Windchill calls coming in to establish if there is any theme or commonality, or if it has just been “one of those months”.

Welcome Jane

Jane Lunn joins the company today, Thursday 1st March as our Services Delivery Administrator. With the arrival of Jane will come some changes and improvements in process for Support, Training and Project Administration. I will communicate any process changes into the company as they are being rolled out. Your support for these changes and Jane’s new role is very important to the success of our team. Please join me in welcoming her.

I want this newsletter to focus on the good we do and help to improve our internal communication. I don’t believe that this needs to be limited to the workplace. Here are some upcoming events, which hope some of you will get involved with.

Concurrent Engineering Cycle Team –

I know we have some avid cyclists in the company. Julian had come up with the idea to make some money for charity, as well as doing something as a team. The Tempest Sportive do a 100-mile cycle event around Warwickshire in July and it will be a great challenge. It takes place on Saturday 21st July, starting at Warwick Racecourse. To help, we’ll put together some training targets for those of you who aren’t regular cyclists to help get you to where you need to be for the event. There is also talk around getting some team jerseys as well! The website for the event is here: https://www.ukcyclingevents.co.uk/events/wiggle-tempest-sportive/

If you are interested in signing up and joining the team, please let myself and Julian know. We’ll start putting everything together. I know there’s a few of you who already said you would be interested so please remind me who you are. Let’s get pedalling!

From Couch to Half Marathon -

Some of you may be aware that Luke followed the ‘Couch to 5K’ 9 week running plan to prepare him for a Colour Run he completed last year. The challenge he’s set himself for 2018 has increased tenfold. Luke will be running the Gloucester City Half Marathon on the 5th August. He was signed up by a friend as a joke, but it’s then spurred him on the prove to himself he can do it. I’m sure you will join me in wishing him the best of luck. Please keep us up to date with your progress.

WALK IT 2018 -

As you know, I have never been the healthiest of people. It’s not something that I talk about too much, but it is something I have been dealing with all my life. There are 300,000 people within the UK suffer from the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Crohns and Ulcerative Colitis and they are living with many complications. These include, but are not limited to; anaemia, a weakened immune system, chronic fatigue, arthritis and malabsorption (inability to absorb nutrients from food / multi-vitamins). I have started to get more involved with the Crohn’s and Colitis UK charity and using their support systems. So I thought it was a good time to give something back. They hold annual events called WALK IT, which are sponsored 5k / 10k walks to raise money to fund vital research. I will be doing a 10k walk in and around the Swansea coastline on 2nd June. I am in the process of setting up a Just Giving page, which I can email a link to everyone once complete. If any of you have some spare pennies lying around, I would be very grateful if you wanted to put them towards this cause. For more information on Crohn’s and Colitis UK their website is https://www.crohnsandcolitis.org.uk/

Birthdays and Work Anniversaries

Everyone loves a celebration! This month, congratulations go out to:

Birthdays:

Adam – March 1st
Luke – March 19^th

Happy Birthday from everyone

Work Anniversaries:

Adrian – 8 years
Andrew – 8 years
Emily – 3 years

Thank you for your hard work and dedication over the years.

Concurrent Engineering & Honeycomb Solutions Team Newsletter

H1 Event Headline

Introduction & Marketing Update - Emily

Marketing Updates

The PTC and Customer Relationship – Owen