Real-World Innovators

“Real-world answers from real-world innovators.” That’s the theme of our Americas Executive Event I’m at. It’s a leadership summit we’ve held the past few years that brings together many of our top customers who are thought leaders on innovation.

 

This morning, two of our executives – CEO Tony Affuso and President Helmuth Ludwig – kicked off the event. It was interesting when Dave Shook, senior VP of Americas, introduced Tony. I had forgotten that Tony was on the customer side of our business for a long time. Dave had sold PLM (although it probably had a different acronym back then) to Tony when he was at Xerox and then later when he was managing GM’s C4 program for EDS. It’s one of the reasons he always connects well with our customers.





 

Tony shared our strong our business has been over the past year. He cited four specific customer implementations he is proud of:

• Canon – where they have reduced time to market by 40% and decreased engineering change orders by 30-50%.


• Volkswagen – where they evaluated us and our major competitors for PDM on a scorecard and we were on top in all categories, including end-user feedback and technical evaluation.


• Unilever – where they’ve created a “common information lifecycle management” system with our tools.


• Nissan – where they’ve reduced prototypes from 3 to 1 and reduced rework by 40%.

 

Helmuth continued sharing more of a business update. He joked that it was interesting that one end of the hotel was a “high blood pressure and migrane” conference (seriously, there was) and on the other end us. So I guess if you don’t have our PLM tools you’d be at the other conference! He shared a little more of the history of why Siemens acquired our company – that like many of the executives in the audience they were looking to consolidate their tool set and leverage a common platform. He also outlined the areas of focus under Project Archimedes, one in particular that is proven to reduce machine time from 9 hours to just one.

So from our vision to the reality for our customers…my next posts will share some detail from the customer presentations that followed.