Ricardo Adopts PTC's Windchill® for PLM to Manage Global Engineering Processes

Integral and Flexible Architecture Optimizes R&D and Improves Collaboration Across Global Engineering Teams.

NEEDHAM, Mass - PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today announced that Ricardo, a leading provider of technology, product innovation, engineering solutions and strategic consulting to the world’s automotive industries, has adopted Windchill® for product lifecycle management (PLM). Windchill, the PTC® PLM software solution, enables designers to manage any type of product data – including mechanical, electronic and software data within the product development life cycle. The use of Windchill will enable Ricardo to improve collaboration across global engineering teams and manage many differing types of product information, including models designed in multiple CAD tools, across all their international locations.

Headquartered in the UK, Ricardo has offices in the USA, Germany, Czech Republic, Russia, Japan, India and China. With all of these disparate locations, getting control of product information on an international scale is imperative. Ricardo has implemented Windchill to manage all CAD data for its 4 primary CAD systems across the USA, UK, Czech Republic, Germany and China. Further planned implementations of Windchill include collaborative engineering as well as change and configuration management.

“Historically, when Ricardo first bought Pro/ENGINEER® in the early 1990s we were on one site in one country and were a relatively small 250 person company,” says Martin Hill, Vice President, Ricardo, Prague. “We are now 1600 people in several countries and managing design information and communication becomes increasingly difficult without PLM. Implementing a common product development infrastructure based on Windchill will increase efficiency and improve collaboration across disparate sites, ultimately helping us to shorten time to market and deliver higher quality products.”

Windchill will be used on all design projects whether the product is a new or an existing product in need of redesign or refurbishment. The project managers and the chief engineers will have much better visibility of drawing and models status and the system will significantly improve Ricardo’s ability to manage and deliver their projects on time and to budget.

"Ricardo is a very successful automotive engineering consulting firm with significant client impact worldwide," says Sin Min Yap, Director, Product and Market Strategy at PTC. "PTC’s strength in managing complex data in a distributed environment is critical for automotive clients like Ricardo. The integral and flexible architecture of Windchill enables clients to support global multi-sites product development team effectively, and help streamline and optimize key product development processes."