Alliance targets PLM at the smaller enterprise

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 5, 2006

Majenta PLM has been appointed a UGS business partner for the small-to-medium manufacturing businesses sector in the UK.

Majenta PLM has been appointed a UGS business partner for the small-to-medium manufacturing businesses sector in the UK.

Setting out the reasoning behind the new agreement, both companies pointed to recent new software developments and to evidence of the growing market for PLM software solutions within the small-to-medium design engineering and manufacturing businesses sector.

A September, 2005 Alert from AMR Research entitled "Mid-market manufacturers investing in innovation technology" states that the mid-market manufacturing sector (defined by AMR as companies with between $30 million and $999 million in annual revenues) is the fastest growing sector of the overall CAD/PLM application software market, with annual growth in spending reckoned to be 12% - substantially higher than the 9% growth for the overall market.

The alert goes on to state that in AMR's view, PLM and CAD 'packaged' application software sales and associated services will grow to $7.2 billion in 2009 from approximately $2.4 billion in 2004, with spending on nonCAD applications such as product data management (PDM), collaborative design tools and product portfolio management software leading the way and more than doubling to $4.2 billion in 2009, from $1.9 billion in 2004.

UGS Corp's response to this and other market research findings of its own has been to develop and launch the Velocity Series - a packaged suite of 3D mechanical design and drafting, analysis, manufacturing and product data management software products - and to reshape its worldwide sales model.

Under this new sales model in the UK, while the major, multi-national OEMs and Tier 1 supplier companies will continue to be looked after by UGS' own direct sales and technical consulting and support staff, all sales to companies with annual revenues, typically, up to $50 million will be the exclusive responsibility of UGS' authorised business partners - such as Majenta PLM.

"Small-to-medium design engineering and manufacturing businesses have limited IT and training resources but recognise that to stay in the race, they need to invest in software solutions that can foster innovation and improve the product development-to-manufacturing process", explained Trevor Stapleton, Sales Director, Majenta PLM.

"The UGS Velocity Series software suite has been developed specifically to address this by making the sort of collaborative product development and data management capabilities previously found only in complex systems that need to be specially configured, available more or less ready to use straight 'out-of-the-box' - typically in five to ten days".

"Irrespective of the industry sector, time to market is the key to success and to market share, no matter how big or how small your company", he added.

"This demands supply chain collaboration and the tools and the ability not just to create data - or product knowledge - but to manage this data and the development process so that the right information is in the right place, at the right time".

"It's the same story as in large enterprises but now it's achievable - and it's affordable - for the UK's small-to-medium businesses too".

With the UGS Velocity Series, the components of which are available both as individual products and as a fully integrated, ready-to-run solution, as well as the high-end NX Series CAD/CAM/CAE and Teamcenter PLM software solutions from UGS, Majenta PLM is confident that it is well positioned to help the UK's small-to-medium design engineering and manufacturing business sector win in an increasingly competitive market.