Project tracking and published milestones have also been made more visible to everyone in development. Web access and monitors are displayed in prominent areas of all development sites where goals and metrics are presented. By publicly displaying detailed information, individuals can see that their efforts are making a difference.

PTC is committed to the “Product First” philosophy. To achieve this goal, we have greatly increased customer involvement throughout the development process. Developing a mutual understanding with our customers is key to providing the best possible solutions. As expected, customer input is also invaluable when making the right release decisions.

This is a very summarized account of recent Pro/ENGINEER quality initiatives that are underway at PTC. Team collaboration and unification of tools & processes across product lines is also prevalent where it makes sense and is allowing us to leverage experience and economies of scale.

PM: How do these efforts differ from past releases?

JV: In addition to implementing the specific actions just discussed, “continuous process improvement” and “attention-to-detail” are cultural advances that we are making with every release. By instilling these virtues in our organizations with increased training, responsibility and accountability, we are seeing measurable improvements.

Finally, increased partnering with you, our customers continues to be the key element in all our QA initiatives. The experience has proven to be mutually valuable to customers and PTC alike. Customers obtain early exposure to the new software features to evaluate upgrade benefits, potential training needs and validate software for deployment in their specific production environments. PTC obtains customer validation of design and implementation before release and full-scale production deployment.

PM: Does PTC provide incentives to developers to encourage good coding?

JV: Yes. Personal goals defined by corporate objectives are an integral part of PTC’s culture. Corporate goals as presented and agreed to by our board of directors, cascade throughout the company and are documented as a part of everyone’s annual performance review. For PTC developers, improving product quality metrics is a major goal.

PM: How have PTC customers been involved in the quality assurance process?

JV: Over the past few years we have greatly increased our direct involvement with you as customers. Our goal has been to stay abreast of your challenges and to gain better insight into product quality improvement needs. As we expected, our direct dealings with you have been invaluable and, as a result, we have increased the scope and number of these activities.

With Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, we offer customer programs that span the entire product development process from design through to early product deployment. To date, QA has already hosted over 60 customer hands-on product events and marketing has sponsored a Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire virtual Web event attended by more than 8800 people.

The following are program descriptions for Pro/E Wildfire customer engagements that have occurred, are currently ongoing or are planned.

• Concept Validation – one day, to one week local user events to introduce usability changes and solicit feedback.

• Virtual Event – one day, web-based introduction seminar for all interested customers.

• MVP Program – two day, local event with some of Pro/E’s most vocal advocates and critics.

• CAD Administrator – forums to provide CAD Administrators with early readiness information.

• Virtual Pre-production – one day, web-based getting started with on-line Q&A

• Pre-production – one week, onsite visit to assist in execution of customer specific test plans, object retrieval, plotting, performance, demos and Q&A.

• Quickstart – eight week, production deployment program with weekly calls to PTC QA to answer questions and fast track urgent CALLS

From concept validation to pre-production engagements, obtaining customer feedback is perhaps the most important step that we are taking to validate product quality before release.

PM: How do you view the relative quality of releases 2000i2, 2001 and the quality targets for Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire and beyond?

JV: Quality Assurance is a process of continuous improvement and we are committed to be relentless in our pursuit of the highest possible quality in our products. Both internal metrics as well as actual customer CALL data indicate that Pro/ENGINEER product quality continues to rise. The improvements we are making are a direct result of your willingness to participate and PTC's continued product quality initiatives.

Our objective is to continue to raise the bar on product quality to reach and maintain our customer satisfaction goals with the upcoming release of Pro/E Wildfire. We believe we have the means, the determination and, with your continued support and involvement, the ability to achieve success.