Eaton goes for design collaboration on PLM

Industrial giant Eaton Corp expects to reduce time and costs of bringing new products to market by building a massive cross-functional, enterprise-wide design collaboration environment spanning all of its global businesses. The firm says it’s going for collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) software from software developer MatrixOne. It will ultimately involve several thousand users – Eaton employees as well as its contract manufacturers, customers and partners – all of which will be able to work together in real-time. “We are focused on driving unification across all of our business units and our value chain by further web-enabling our employees, customers, suppliers, and partners,” says Donald Bullock, vice president of IT for Eaton. Instead of relying on meetings, site visits, fax, e-mail an so on, customers with engineer-to-order products will be able to interact with Eaton’s and its associated design engineers online in real-time to review, mark-up and approve designs and design changes. “MatrixOne’s collaborative PLM solutions are critical to achieving that goal,” says Bullock. Specifically, Eaton will be using the firm’s collaborative product development suites. The eMatrix Global Collaboration Platform and MatrixOne Engineering Central together enable global product development teams to share, develop and manage technical product information and processes from a common information repository – across the entire product lifecycle. This is another classic example of the power now of packaged PLM systems to transform how companies bring products to market, and then manage ongoing change – through early and consistent online collaboration with customers and suppliers. Putting engineering IT at the heart of a manufacturing enterprise has long been a slogan; now it’s being delivered. By integrating its new PLM system with its existing viewing and mechanical CAD systems, Eaton will succeed in opening embedded information to all users across its supply chains.