APPLICATIONS

NEEDHAM, Mass., -- PTC, the product development company(TM), and Airbus today announced that PTC Windchill(R) product lifecycle management solutions have been deployed to create the "product information backbone" of the Airbus A380, the 555 passenger super jumbo aircraft now under development. "The implementation of the Windchill-based backbone is a major collaborative milestone, significantly advancing Airbus' integration," said Rolf Stefan Scheible, vice president of Airbus Concurrent Engineering. "Airbus chose Windchill because of its ability to support Airbus' challenging industrial product information backbone requirements," said Jim Heppelmann, PTC executive vice president, software solutions, and chief technical officer. "Airbus required the advanced architecture, maturity, and performance offered by Windchill as well as its compatibility with other design and enterprise systems for resource planning, customer relationship management, and scheduling." PRIMES (Product Relative Information Management Enterprise Systems), the Windchill-based Airbus deployment, allows the organization to manage product structure, change management, the overall release process, 2D and 3D visualization, and connectivity to other systems, including legacy systems such as ERP. A new deployment of more than 600 seats, to be based in the United Kingdom, brings to more than 2,000 the total number of Windchill seats deployed inside Airbus today. The rest of the deployment is in France, Germany and Spain, in various departments such as Engineering, Manufacturing, Program Management, and Non Specific Design. The deployment is expected to increase to more than 5,000 seats in 2003 with a project beginning this month. Windchill is used across the entire Airbus consortium, providing support for the multi-site organization spanning several countries. The second phase will also allow management of the federated product structure across all sites, effectivity calculation, and complete and direct integration of the various CAD/CAM tools on site. "We need to collaborate internally and externally," explained Paul Nash, Airbus Concurrent Engineering Project Product Configuration Domain Leader. "The fluidity of information provided by Windchill allows us to keep track of the aircraft product information required to design, manufacture, support and maintain a product, allowing rapid access across Europe and worldwide." Airbus is also using 2,000 seats of PTC's CADDS(R)5 software, which has been successfully used for the A340-500/600 programs, representing more than 60% of the CAD seats in the A380 project.