Centric Software Launches Revolutionary Innovation Center

Virtual Team Project Room for Process and Product Innovation

MICAD, PARIS, March 26, 2002 - Centric Software, Inc., the leading provider of Collaborative Product Innovation (CPI) solutions for the globally distributed design chain, today introduced the revolutionary Innovation Center(tm) - a patent-pending 3D virtual environment that allows distributed project teams to efficiently review new ideas, evaluate these ideas for potential new product concepts, validate the resulting concepts with the customer and supply chain, and thereby reach a rapid "go-to-market" decision.

"Depth and breadth of partnerships will be marking the winners and losers in the manufacturing sector. Firms that are able to collaborate with both their supplier partners and customers will be at a distinct advantage. Establishing an extended value-chain will be one of the critical activities manufacturing firms will need to accomplish in the next few years. At one end of the value chain is the customer whose involvement in the product design process ensures that the product being developed is what is wanted. At the other end of the value-chain, the OEM works closely with trading partners to develop the best components to fit into the assembly by collaborating across multiple dimensions of product knowledge," said Jack Maynard, Aberdeen Group research director for collaborative enterprise solutions. "Centric Software's Innovation Center serves as the foundation for competitive advantage, empowering manufacturers to optimize innovation, dramatically accelerate development of market-dominating products, and in doing so reduce both time-to-market and product costs."

The Innovation Center provides a unique environment for the entire new product development team. With the first of its family of innovation solutions - Innovation Management(tm) - team members can share ideas and review them in a collaborative environment, project managers can track activities and deliverables, and executives can access and manage multi-program opportunities. This environment parallels the physical world of war rooms and project rooms and facilitates the creation of more unique and innovative product possibilities, which are then defined, explored and ultimately validated. This enables manufacturers and their supplier network to increase new product successes by 200 percent through harvesting, testing, and converting more "raw" ideas into market-dominating products, ensuring the development of more innovative products within critical windows of opportunity.

"At Volvo, we were faced with the challenge of assessing ideas from geographically dispersed teams in order to quickly turn a multitude of concepts into products. Centric Innovation provided Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center with a unique 3D, digital, collaborative project environment in which teams could meet and review concepts in the context of new product programs, and present these to executives for go-to-market decisions," said Benny Sommerfeld, concept business manager, Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center. "This streamlined our processes, and increased our capacity. With Innovation Management, Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center can significantly decrease concept cycle time, allowing for more focus on the upstream innovation process."

Manufacturers and their supplier network are under pressure to optimize their levels of product innovation - be it linear, customer-driven or radical innovation. Centric Software developed the Innovation Center and its Innovation Management solution to allow team members to review and manage their new-product portfolio. The Innovation Center, built on core Centric Innovation technology, provides a robust project gateway to innovation, thus maximizing team effectiveness.

"As a global leader in the space industry, we at Astrium recognize the need for accelerating innovation by leveraging the expertise of our extended cross-functional teams. Remaining at the forefront of this highly competitive industry requires us to continually innovate our processes, as we have done with Centric Innovation," said Bernard Foch, Astrium CAD/CAE group manager. "Using Centric Innovation, we dramatically improve workflow by synchronously and asynchronously collaborating with our supplier network, allowing for effective management and traceability of project activities and documents. These capabilities result in a significant competitive advantage for Astrium."

About Centric Software

Centric Software, Inc. accelerates process and product innovation by empowering manufacturers to maximize the expertise of their entire supplier network to deliver compelling, market-dominating products within critical windows of opportunity. Centric Software's Collaborative Product Innovation (CPI) software solutions enable complete team collaboration to define, synthesize and validate next generation products over the web. Centric Innovation integrates disparate data as well as business and technical processes from the extended enterprise into a single unified environment, enabling manufacturers to optimize all three levels of innovation - linear, customer-driven and radical innovation. Centric Software is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and provides sales and support services to its customers through its offices worldwide. 

www.centricsoftware.com

 

Sponsored Links

AnyDWG Offers DWG to PDF, DWG to DXF, PDF to DWG, DWG to JPG, PDF to DXF Converters

AutoDWG offers DWF to DWG, DWG to PDF , PDF to DWG, DWG to Flash Converters, DWG Viewer.

eCampus.com Get your stuff for College... Cheap! Textbooks, Greek Gear, DVD's, University Clothing, Computers and MORE!

Access Your PC from Anywhere Free Trial plus 10% Off!