PTC's integral Product Development System (PDS) solves an expensive problem faced by discrete manufacturing companies. Many manufacturers delay the technical publications process until the product design is stable, putting the technical publications process on the critical path for getting products to market. Manufacturers often find that they have a physical product ready but are unable to ship due to a lack of supporting documentation, resulting in lost or delayed revenue and competitive vulnerability. Moreover, a sluggish publications process makes it troublesome for a company to respond to new market opportunities or to optimize services-related operations.

Similarly, markets outside of manufacturing such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and publishing also face the challenge of optimizing a publishing process that handles complex content that continually changes and often must comply with industry and governmental regulations. Companies in these markets require a system that enables all applicable downstream output to be automatically regenerated and republished to the selected audience in the appropriate media.

The integration between Windchill 8.0 and Arbortext 5.2 advances PTC's vision for its Product Development System by allowing companies to optimize their technical publications process. The PTC PDS is designed to deliver the full complement of capabilities on an integral architecture that supports the global nature of product development, including the technical publications process. Specifically for technical publications, the PTC PDS enables companies to create content using an XML-based component approach, collaborate within and across organizational boundaries, control and manage content configurations and related processes, and communicate relevant information to a wide variety of audiences. This integration provides a significant opportunity for PTC customers to improve both the quality of technical publications and the process by which they are developed.

"In our line of work, product quality is of unsurpassed importance," said Chuck Oien, deputy director, information technologies at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. "We think that this integration will allow us to deliver technical documentation that will conform to the exacting guidelines required for activities like the SS21 (Seamless Safety for the 21st century) program compliance, our model-based capability implementation and others. We also expect to see productivity gains from moving our tedious manual process to an automated electronic one. Moreover, the combination of Arbortext and Windchill will easily allow our documentation requirements to adapt to the necessary and continual updates. We are anxiously looking forward to deploying this solution."

Highlights of the Windchill-Arbortext integration include:

Arbortext Editor(TM) can now connect to the Windchill PDMLink(TM) server to enable management of Arbortext document components as Windchill objects.
The ability to 'burst' Arbortext-authored documents into document components within Windchill, which enables configuration and lifecycle management (check in, check out, revise, promote, workflow) at both the component and document "assembly" level.
The ability to browse and search document components managed in Windchill and maximize reuse, thus reducing authoring time, increasing quality and improving time to market.
The ability to author documents collaboratively so that multiple authors can work simultaneously on different components of the same document.
The ability to implement workflow-driven process automation to speed document review and approval, optimize change management and trigger Arbortext Publishing Engine(TM) to deliver audience-specific publications in the appropriate format.
The ability to incorporate graphics into documents.
Support for review and markup of Arbortext PDF publications using the optional ProductView(TM) software.

"Automating the creation of documentation promises to relieve significant expense and reduce lead times," said Jim Brown, vice president, global product innovation and engineering at Aberdeen Group. "With the automation enabled by PTC's solution, changes to product information can be dynamically propagated to the appropriate documentation. Dynamic updates not only reduce the effort and cost involved in creating documents, they also create a strategic opportunity to develop documentation in parallel with product design, which can help speed time-to-market and innovation."

"This first major post-acquisition milestone represents a significant evolution of the PTC Product Development System," said James Heppelmann, executive vice president, software products, and chief product officer, PTC. "We're delivering on our promise to help organizations concurrently design innovative products and produce high quality technical documentation. Organizations that take advantage of the Windchill-Arbortext integration will have the tools to deliver new products to market faster and at lower costs."

The integration is delivered with Windchill 8.0 M020 and Arbortext 5.2 M010, which will be available early May 2006. Windchill and Arbortext customers with current maintenance are entitled to receive these new releases free of charge. For more information on Windchill 8.0 and Arbortext 5.2, please visit the Windchill and Arbortext product pages on ptc.com