SofTech, Inc. News
SofTech's ProductCenter Facilitates Global Operations at Saint-Gobain Crystals Division
Cuts Customer Quote Cycle Time by 20% to Accelerate New BusinessTEWKSBURY, Mass., July 31, 2003 — SofTech, Inc. (OTCBB: SOFT), a leading provider of design-through-manufacturing productivity solutions, announced that its Workgroup Technology Division’s ProductCenter collaborative product data management (PDM) solution is helping Saint-Gobain’s Crystals Division increase productivity throughout its international engineering and manufacturing operations. Efficiencies include reducing the time it takes to process customer quotations for engineered products by 20 percent, enhancing customer responsiveness and decreasing the time it takes to secure new business.
St. Gobain’s Crystals Division uses a non-confidential form of a design drawing called a sales drawing to provide to customers and prospects. Design drawings and sales drawing are controlled and linked in ProductCenter. If one is changed, the other is automatically updated, ensuring that information relayed to customers and prospects is always accurate and up to date, as well as fully documented for later manufacture.
“Being able to control, access, and distribute PDFs of sales drawings to customers, production, and purchasing has improved our responsiveness. In fact, it has decreased our quote cycle times by almost 20% for engineered products,” states Scott Huth, Saint-Gobain director of engineering for the Scintillation organization of the Crystals Division.
In addition to automating quote processes and customer sales drawings, the company has also automated configuration management, engineering change notices, and other product lifecycle processes with ProductCenter and ProductCenter™ Workflow for these additional benefits:
- Enhanced global communication and collaboration among company’s international operations; quicker ramp-up of India-based engineering support organization
- Automated engineering change management to improve communications, streamline release to manufacturing, and reduce errors
- Improved engineering productivity allows engineers to focus on design task
At the Newbury facility, ProductCenter is used exclusively for managing all engineering documentation, revision control, engineering change processes, and quote processes that come through engineering, as well as return process and new design release process to manufacturing; with the business automating and going paperless on all these processes.
For the full customer case study on Saint-Gobain’s use of and advantages gained with ProductCenter visit SofTech’s Web site at www.softech.com.
About Saint-Gobain
Saint-Gobain Crystals is a worldwide business of the Saint-Gobain High Performance Materials Sector. The parent company Saint-Gobain (France) is one of the top 100 industrial companies in the world. A leading producer of flat glass, containers, reinforcements, insulation, building materials, specialized distribution, piping, abrasives and industrial ceramics, Saint-Gobain has sales of approximately $30 billion. The company employees approximately 171,000 people in 46 countries.
About SofTech
SofTech, Inc. (OTCBB: SOFT) provides design-through-manufacturing productivity solutions with its computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and product data management (PDM) products including CADRA®, DesignGateway™, Prospector™, and ProductCenter™ (through SofTech’s Workgroup Technology Division). SofTech’s solutions optimize product lifecycle management at the lowest cost by fostering innovation, extended enterprise collaboration, product quality improvements, and compressed time-to-market cycles.
SofTech has more than 100,000 users benefiting from its solutions, including Boeing, FlightSafety International, General Electric Company, Goodrich Turbine Fuel Technologies, Honeywell, Millipore Corporation, Siemens, Sikorsky Aircraft, U.S. Army, and Whirlpool Corporation.
Headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, SofTech (www.softech.com) has locations and distribution partners throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
SofTech, CADRA, DesignGateway, ProductCenter and Prospector are trademarks or registered trademarks of SofTech, Inc., in the U.S. and/or other countries. SofTech is a trademark of SofTech, Inc. All other brands, logos, products or company names are the copyrights and/or trademarks of their respective holders.
