Publishing software smoothes RandD

A PTC - Parametric Technology (UK) product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 1, 2008

Arbortext will help ZTE improve and personalise its product documentation, editing and publishing process.

ZTE Corporation has successfully implemented Arbortext, PTC's dynamic publishing solution, across its organisation.

Arbortext will help ZTE improve and personalise its product documentation, editing and publishing process.

China's rapidly expanding global economy brings both opportunities and challenges for Chinese telecommunications manufacturers.

In order to compete in today's business environment and become an international manufacturing centre with world-class brands, ZTE focuses on independent innovation.

Independent innovation is a Chinese government released campaign to create higher value-added home-grown products, services and technologies.

78% of the ZTE's workforce dedicated to R and D initiatives and around 10% of annual revenues are channeled to this field.

Furthermore, ZTE has set up 16 R and D centres and institutes across the US, India and Sweden.

ZTE has used PTC's Pro/Engineer and Windchill product lifecycle management (PLM) software since 1998 to improve design and collaboration efficiencies.

After their product design process had been enhanced, ZTE encountered problems with product documentation management.

Even though ZTE has 200 document engineers responsible for product documentation, it struggled with creating timely manufacturing development documents and with providing customers with up to date, personalised product usage instructions.

ZTE was unable to properly leverage a large amount of its historical documentation because its legacy system made it difficult to identify and retrieve data and because ZTE had a manual process for updating product documents.

Even though ZTE dedicated a significant effort to update product documents, these problems still impacted customer satisfaction and new product time to market.

Ultimately, ZTE realised that a complete product document management system could help to solve these problems.

ZTE chose to work with PTC to implement PTC's dynamic publishing solutions, including Arbortext Editor, Arbortext Styler, Arbortext Architect, Arbortext Publish Engine and Arbortext Content Manager.

In addition to enabling ZTE to move its product document publishing processes from a desktop operating system to PTC's dynamic publishing solution, Arbortext solutions also help ZTE meet its requirements for document content management and modification, ensuring that all publishing content comes from only one, reliable data source.

By implementing PTC solutions, ZTE has increased the efficiency of its product document engineers and is able to ensure that all data sources can be entered and modified simultaneously by multiple people.

This has improved the document publishing process, increasing the consistency between document quality and document publication.

Moreover, Arbortext solutions have enabled ZTE to automate publications' formatting and sending process, significantly improving the update speed of the product data documents and publications.

"We selected Arbortext Dynamic Publishing solutions to help us to reduce and even eliminate the product document management gap between us and large-scale, international companies like Nokia and Nortel", said Chen Jian Zhou, Dean of ZTE University.

"The addition of Arbortext to our existing implementation of PTC products, creates a single system for product development that is able to provide ZTE with the highest levels of efficiency and re-use and ultimately a distinct advantage over our competitors".