PTC Closes the Loop between Product Requirements and Design with Windchill Requirementslink

0806/2009

Press Release PTC; NEEDHAM, MA – Expands the Power of Windchill to Manage, Track and Cross-Reference Requirements as Part of the Overall Product Development Process.

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company, today launched Windchill® RequirementsLink, the newest addition to its Windchill content and process management family of solutions, and a key component of the PTC Product Development System. By establishing an integral relationship between customer needs, market requirements and the underlying technical requirements, Windchill RequirementsLink helps ensure that customer and market requirements have been satisfied by designs and properly verified during development. This ultimately helps customers deliver winning products with faster time-to-market, improved quality and reduced costs.

Requirements capture and management is a critical product development process that focuses upon translating customer and market needs into prioritised requirements, targets and constraints while establishing bi-directional traceability between requirements, analysis documentation, product designs, BOMs, and verification data. Many customers find it challenging to properly define and select requirements, ensure requirements are visible throughout the development process, and understand the relationships between requirements and product data. It is critical to understand both how design changes impact requirements and how requirement changes impact designs, schedule and costs.

Windchill RequirementsLink offers powerful new capabilities that help optimise the requirements capture and management process. Highlights include:

• Utilise the power of Windchill to manage requirements as part of the overall product development process
• Import requirements from Microsoft Word or Excel directly into Windchill
• Keep requirements specifications and traceability matrices synchronised and up-to-date
• Track and control changes to individual requirements and collections of requirements
• Define and track relationships between individual requirements within and across specifications, and to any design data - such as parts, CAD documents, technical documentation, and documents - managed in Windchill
• Provide traceability from requirements through the logical definition of a product, to the physical components implementing the design
• Define and link verification requirements to functional and performance requirements at every level of the design.

“It is essential to understand how each customer requirement affects every component within the product structure as this guides our design approach as well as ensures that all requirements can be validated,” said Eric Krieg, Mechanical Design Discipline Lead at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.  “This knowledge is also critical in understanding how a particular requirement change affects the overall cost and scope of the project.  A requirements management solution that is integral to PLM can have a significant positive impact on the amount of time and effort associated with managing how requirements relate to the product structure as well as assessing the impact of a particular requirement change.”

“As a software development company, PTC clearly understands the challenges customers face in managing complex requirements and the need to include requirements as an integral part of the product development lifecycle,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, product development, PTC.  “Windchill RequirementsLink demonstrates PTC’s ongoing commitment to investment in new capabilities that enable our customers to strengthen key development processes that significantly contribute to the success of their business initiatives.”

Windchill RequirementsLink Availability

Windchill RequirementsLink is scheduled to be available during Q4 FY2009* and requires Windchill PDMLink. For more information on Windchill RequirementsLink, please visit the Windchill RequirementsLink product pages on www.ptc.com.

*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.