Part One of this “Strange Trip” Article Series delved into a little of the origin of Zero Wait-State and our strategic shift in Sales, Marketing, and Product Development, which included our recent hires. One of our key objectives is to provide our clients with unique business advantages they can leverage to maximize their product development efficiency. To that end, we have put more and more focus and resources into our Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) automation software products. Our development team has enhanced our existing products and launched three major products over the last year: AttributeState, DocState and RestState. All 3 new software products have been rolled out this year to clients – including Stanley, Teleflex and Cisco – with some impressive results, including one client seeing almost a million dollars a month ROI from leveraging our exclusive PLM Automation Software Suite.
Using these customization frameworks, customers are able to automate labor intensive activities, improve the quality of information in PLM, and enable capabilities that give them more flexibility within their organization to streamline product development.
AttributeState: Rapid application development framework for customizing and automating PLM processes, including change control, release to manufacturing, and new product introduction based on configurable templates with embedded business logic
DocState: Document and report generation software that extends the custom document generation abilities of Agile PLM into customer defined templates including CSV, HTML, Word and Excel with company branding and document styles
RestState: Modern REST-based Agile PLM integration framework enabling customers to script HTML 5 compatible User Interfaces (UI) for casual users, create mobile applications, and develop more modern and secure integration interfaces between their Agile PLM platform and other enterprise applications and cloud services
David Stewart, our CTO and Co-Founder, has this to say, “We continue to hear from customers that end users are ignoring processes, making data entry errors, and demanding impossible-to-maintain, one-off customizations. Our PLM Automation Software Suite solves all of these issues.”
Dries D’hooghe, VP of Products & Services, added, “With these new products, our customers automate repetitive functions, improve the user experience, and increase data quality. It’s clear they realize bottom-line benefits with products that extend their ability to simultaneously streamline operations and continuously adjust business processes.”
When David and myself changed the direction of ZWS in 2010, we decided to focus on Engineering Collaboration and CAD PDM integration as a way to differentiate ourselves and stand out. We have accumulated many successful customers from this endeavor and built a thriving practice in this area. We work with companies like Raytheon, Qualcomm, Lockheed, Google, Cisco, Harris, Sub Zero/Wolf, and many more to support their CAD data migration and Engineering Collaboration needs. More importantly, we have developed capabilities along the way that have allowed us to become a full service PLM solutions provider that can address all the requirements a company has around getting the maximum value out of their PLM investment. The next logical step was to further leverage this experience to develop our own technology that enhances the PLM value proposition by automating and accelerating product development processes impacted by PLM. Over the next few months, we will be highlighting these solutions with real world examples of how companies are finally achieving the full promise of PLM without having to compromise. Our solutions allow PLM to be extended to address the needs of product development companies without the downsides usually associated with customization.
As I said in the beginning, it's been a long, strange trip, but definitely worth it. Like they say, it's the journey, not the final destination. Tune in to our PLM Automation Software Suite webinar series and you may find yourself with free tickets to the College Football Bowl game of your choice. Either way, the knowledge you gain on how to make dramatic improvements to your PLM system will be worth the time.
