White Papers

As a result of intense global competition, Medical Device manufacturers are finding they must boost innovation while facing some new and highly complex business challenges, including global product development, outsourcing of design and manufacturing, and the need to update product development technology.

Product development has never been easy, but in today’s global market, the pressures facing industrial manufacturers are greater than ever.

In a recent survey of executives at worldwide manufacturing companies, over 44% of respondents stated that globalizing key business functions was one of their top three corporate initiatives–up from just 28% the year before.

If you want to understand the competitive pressures that manufacturers face today, study the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) industry.

Industrial manufacturers are facing unprecedented demand to deliver multiple product variations–which is driving up both costs and complexity in product development.

Medical Device manufacturers are facing some of the most difficult challenges ever encountered by the industry. As competition intensifies, they must innovate and capitalize on new opportunities and expedite time to market.

To address the growing demand for smarter products, many manufacturers are incorporating embedded systems into their products. While this approach offers exciting opportunities for innovation, it also adds a level of complexity to products that have zero tolerance for bugs and must beat the competition to market. Companies successfully addressing these challenges are reaping the benefits with higher profitability, an impressive achievement given the current economy.

Methods of working collaboratively have existed as long as humans have joined together to accomplish tasks that could be done better by a team than an individual.

PTC and Mentor Graphics have developed their own sets of ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions that can also work together. These are the first two companies to develop solutions that adopt the new ECAD-MCAD data exchange format introduced by ProSTEP.

The relationship between Automotive OEMs and Tier One suppliers is going through profound changes today. As OEMs continue expanding their focus on systems integration and responding faster to new market opportunities, Tier One suppliers are taking on a much larger role in value creation and innovation.

In the world of Aerospace & Defense programs, Sustainment & Supportability have become a major cost consideration within complex systems.

Today’s life science companies are struggling in their attempt to efficiently design complex products, sometimes adding multiple options in order to meet the requirements of various market segments.

The power to quickly deliver the highest quality, most accurate digital models is what Pro/ENGINEER is all about. But how do organizations unleash the full power of Pro/ENGINEER to help them optimize product development and global design processes?

Shipbuilders across the globe are facing a number of strategic pressures, including a mandate to deliver ships within shorter timescales, increasing complexity and modularity in ship design, and more restrictive environmental laws, not to mention the on-going demand to lower initial build and operating costs.

With A&D products containing hundreds of thousands of parts, and potentially millions of lines of software code–produced by hundreds of companies dispersed across the globe, Aerospace, Defense and Shipbuilding organizations understand the fundamental value and dire need for robust Change & Configuration Management (CM) processes.

In today’s challenging economic environment, retailers and brands are struggling for their very survival, with little cause for optimism on future sales growth.

Today’s life science companies are struggling in their attempt to efficiently design complex products, sometimes adding multiple options in order to meet the requirements of various market segments.

Whether you’re dealing with the stock market, the weather – or that elusive condition known as customer behavior, having an ability to accurately predict the future can lead to success in nearly any endeavor.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed critical gaps in U.S. military readiness and now provide vivid examples of the ever-present need to stay ahead of an adaptive enemy.

In today’s challenging economic environment, retailers and brands are struggling for their very survival, with little cause for optimism on future sales growth.

Today’s A&D programs must deliver better product and program performance than ever before.

In today’s global, competitive marketplace, manufacturers are scrutinizing every cost and revenue center in order to cut costs and improve performance. One opportunity for significant change is the creation and delivery of technical product information as it relates to launching and maintaining products throughout their lifecycle.

Airlines face a difficult business environment, made more challenging by mounting regulatory pressures. Technical Document Management (TDM), an often-neglected area, promises relief, notably in flight operations.

Global collaboration has become a necessity for companies. According to AMR, companies that effectively outsource and collaborate globally can grow market share through increased innovation 30-50%, reduce time-to-market by up to 50%, and increase their margins and return on investment by reducing R&D resources by 25%.

Each year, companies invest thousands of dollars in systems and processes to improve their aftermarket operations—ultimately, to better serve their customers. And while most of this investment is spent on specialized systems, such as call centers, fi eld service, and spare parts management, some organizations are implementing larger enterprise deployments of CRM, ERP, and PLM.

Now, more than ever, organizations need to effectively communicate global product information if they are to operate successfully on the world stage.

Short for “Darwin Information Typing Architecture,” DITA may be the most compelling innovation in technical publishing since the invention of XML.

DITA is one of the most important innovations in XML publishing in recent memory. And if you’re using or plan to use XML for publishing technical documentation, you will encounter DITA sooner or later.

Ninety-percent of published information is stale; customers are overloaded with information, but usually cannot find what they need; the field force is dispatched to service calls with incorrect instructions; help desks desperately shuffle through a myriad of papers to find obsolete answers; manufacturers frequently publish incomplete or outdated information.

How do some of today’s most successful organizations maintain a rapid, high-variety fl ow of new products, while claiming greater market share, earning higher price premiums, and using fewer knowledge workers than their competitors?

For a manufacturing company, product development is a mission-critical process. It can also be a very expensive process. In fact, in many manufacturing sectors, companies are reinvesting between 3% and 8% of their total revenues back into product development each year.

S1000D is an international specification for creating, managing and maintaining technical publications within the civilian and military Aerospace & Defense (A&D) industry.

A U.S. Air Force Technical Order (TO) contains all policies and procedures related to maintenance and/or operation of specific Air Force weapon systems.

Ninety-percent of published information is stale; customers are overloaded with information, but usually cannot find what they need ; the field force is dispatched to service calls with incorrect instructions; help desks desperately shuffle through a myriad of papers to find obsolete answers; manufacturers frequently publish incomplete or outdated information.

A prevalent risk in the Aerospace and Defense (A&D) industry is the sharing of technical information and intellectual property (IP) across extended enterprises.

This white paper investigates how Mathcad is being adopted by A&D engineering organizations to replace spreadsheets and traditional programming languages, and how Mathcad’s unique capabilities are solving key issues for organizations and helping technical teams improve efficiency.

Managing engineering change has always been hard, and is a regular source of inefficency and irritation for manufacturers. Over the years, many companies have focused on improving the efficiency of change mangement.

Medical device manufacturers face the same intense competition that other manufacturers face, but with the added burden of having to plan, develop, test and produce in an environment rigidly controlled by regulatory requirements.

Every company must move quickly today to gain an edge, but electronics and high tech companies must operate at light speed while simultaneously managing product quality, project and product data, as well as globally dispersed engineering and manufacturing teams.

Global outsourcing, competition, price erosion, environmental regulations, compressed development cycles: these are just a few of the challenges product development companies are facing every day.

Winning at product development not only requires innovative products, but also development cycles that are on time and on budget.

The Electronics and High Tech (E&HT) industry is facing many challenges associated with a product’s design as it moves through the various stages of the product development lifecycle.

Rapidly advancing technologies and growing consumer demands are putting enormous pressure on high tech product development companies to develop increasingly complex products.

Get a closer look at Product Lifecycle Management in Retail, Footwear, and Apparel. PTC examines the benefits of a process-centric approach to PLM in the key areas of: Line Planning, Creative Design, Material and Color Development, Spec Development, and Vendor Collaboration.

PLM–Product Lifecycle Management – is being touted throughout nearly every industry today as the cure-all for ineffi cient product development. And yet, achieving measurable benefits, well beyond the marketing hype, is anything but automatic.

With the promise of transforming the way products are developed, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is one of the fastest growing areas of technology investment for retailers and brands alike. But you may ask, WHY SHOULD MY COMPANY CONSIDER PLM: Because my competition is? Because industry analysts mandate it? Because my legacy system has seen better days?

For most electronics and high tech companies, the bill-of-materials (BOM) is the central hub of product definition activities. It conveys the information needed by various departments, such as Engineering, Procurement and Manufacturing, to get the product built. However, current BOM development processes are not well-suited to today’s realities.

With A&D products containing tens of thousands of parts, and potentially millions of lines of software code–produced by hundreds of companies dispersed across the globe, Aerospace & Defense organizations understand the fundamental value and dire need for robust Change & Configuration Management (CM) processes.

3D CAD is a critical application with the promise to improve the productivity of engineers as well as cut substantial costs from product development budgets.

If you’re a design engineer working in a “typical” manufacturing company, you may be spending 60% to 80 % of your time updating and optimizing old designs, or making changes for ECOs, instead of creating new designs.