Passenger transport manufacturer Wrightbus reports significant improvements in collaborative product development since going live with PTC’s Windchill PLM (product lifecycle management) system.
The Ballymena, Northern Ireland-based company, which has been using PTC’s Pro/Engineer CAD/CAM/CAE since 2000, says Windchill is strengthening the business processes that keep it ahead of its competition.
“In order to maintain our position we recognised that our engineering processes needed to become a seamless part of the overall business process,” explains Martin Graham, director of IT and logistics at Wrightbus.
Wrightbus, which is a pioneer of low-floor buses, established Windchill to improve product structure management, change management and work flow control. Graham says this has enabled the release of product structure data to the production system, using an optimised process flow, and provided accurate data release from PLM to its ERP system.
“By adopting Windchill as our common product information management platform we are now able to synchronise all our internal processes and our aim now is to eliminate 50% of non-value-add activities in engineering.”