Solutions for product development, management

With the advent of Europe’s WEEE and RoHS regulations and China’s Regulation for Pollution Control of Electronics Products (RPCEP), it is no surprise that the focus on product and inventory management has soared to new heights. For companies that ship electronics and high tech products internationally, this means making a serious decision on how to keep up with these changing regulations.



“Environmental regulatory compliance and product management in the global industry bring a lot of challengers for suppliers,” said Nicole Rowe, director of corporate communications at PTC. Suppliers will face hundreds of reengineering and information requests from their customers, each in different formats and with different requirements. Products themselves will be redesigned, creating the potential for chaos in numbering and tracking parts. Part selection, BOM analysis, workflow approval and reporting will take on new urgency. Tracking of configurations, inventory, suppliers, raw materials and more will have new legal implications.



PTC, a company known for product lifecycle management (PLC), content management and dynamic publishing software solutions, offers a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Solution to help electronics and high tech companies meet all these regulations. The solution can be rapidly configured to address country-by-country environmental laws or customer-specific regulations that might suddenly arise.

BUSINESS ROADMAP

PTC has been on a spending spree in the last few years, acquiring small companies such as Arbortext for documentation creation and automation, and Itedo for its Isodraw product, which creates technical illustrations based on 3DCAD geometry.



According to Rowe, their expansion strategy is carefully analyzed and complementary to their technology offerings. “For instance, Arbortext’s dynamic document publishing process works in a very similar way to our Pro/Engineer. It provides an environment in which the user can create text for documents just once, and then reuse it many times over in an efficient manner.” Technical documentation for manufactured items is equally important as intelligent design systems to develop these products. By adding this feature, manufacturers can get the most out of their whole development process for the product and the associated documentation.



The acquisitions obviously did not hurt revenues – with the company earning $855 million in FY2006. Forty-two percent of sales come from North America, 34 percent from Europe, and 24 percent from Asia Pacific. By product line, 66 percent goes to the desktop segment and 34 percent to the enterprise segment.



“Business is solid, with 19 percent year-on-year growth,” added Rowe. “Asia is still the smallest market, but it is growing.”



Click here for more information on Environmental Regulatory Compliance from PTC.