The PTC Large Customer Forum

by Frank H. Strieffler, Lockheed Martin

PTC’s large customers have literally thousands of seats of Pro/ENGINEER installed throughout North America and the rest of the world. Supporting installations of this size presents a host of challenges. For example, how does a large company handle mass deployment? Companies cannot afford to physically visit thousands of machines and individually install the software every time a new build of Pro/ENGINEER is required. With that many machines to upgrade, companies need a way to install once and then push that install to the other machines on the network.

Recognizing their common interests, a group of representatives from large companies began to meet in 2002 through the PTC Large Customer Forum. Most of the participants know each other from serving together on various PTC/USER Technical Committees.

The Forum’s Process

Members of the PTC Large Customer Forum participate in a series of teleconferences every year.  Participants work together to identify the Pro/ENGINEER issues that PTC needs to address most urgently and then draft a list of priorities.

The PTC/USER Board of Directors then takes the list and presents top-level feedback from it to PTC management during their annual face-to-face meeting. PTC Product Development receives the complete, detailed list of issues.

The Forum’s Value

All parties benefit from this exchange. By influencing the resolution of these items, the Forum companies decrease their total cost of ownership of PTC products. In six sigma parlance, the companies are leaning out their development processes. At the same time, working with Forum members provides PTC the direction it needs to make Pro/ENGINEER software even more competitive.

Ultimately, all PTC product users gain value. Most issues raised by the PTC Large Customer Forum are relevant to all companies—making the transition to new versions of the software, managing data, and facing other challenges. In fact, the issues may even be magnified for smaller companies, because they may have fewer resources with which to deal with them.

The Current List of Issues

In 2004, the PTC Large Customer Forum documented the following list of issues: 

• Software quality, including improving how PTC and large customers work together to uncover bugs before the software is used in production, and improving the process in which SPRs are turned into TANs and TPIs
• Data exchange, including improving the interoperability between Pro/ENGINEER and other MCAD tools
• Data management, including Pro/INTRALINK support
• Mass deployment
• Technical support
• Change management, including the apparently inappropriate marking of data as changed
• Support of model-centric design (i.e., moving to one 3-D, digital dataset that captures and leverages intelligence throughout the enterprise)
• Sharing data over a wide range of sites, including federated environments
• Multi-language support
• Miscellaneous issues, such as rebundling products, license management, Linux support, and ModelCHECK improvements.

PTC Feedback

After receiving the 2004 list, PTC Product Development followed up with the PTC Large Customer Forum members through a teleconference and a webcast. Working in the spirit of close partnership, PTC shared very forward-looking information about how it is addressing some of the issues in both the near and longer term. The meeting also provided an opportunity for Forum participants to offer additional clarification and feedback. The Forum companies are generally pleased with the progress PTC is making in addressing the critical issues and plan to continue the process this year.

Benefits to PTC/USER Members

The PTC Large Customer Forum is yet another reason to participate in a PTC/USER Technical  Committee. By documenting issues and working with PTC to resolve them, the Forum is participating in the kind of bi-directional exchange of information that Evan Caille describes in his article in this issue (see “Enhancing Information Exchange”). Through this  exchange with PTC, Forum companies  help to address the software issues that will yield the greatest productivity gains. The improvements that come out of this process benefit all users of PTC products.

Frank H. Strieffler is a senior member of the engineering staff at Lockheed Martin’s Engineering Process Improvement Center, which leads the PTC Large Customer Forum. .