Excerpt from 3D CAD Tips’ Evan Yares:
Whirlpool has been a long-term PTC customer, first using Pro/E in 1986, and standardizing on it in 1990. The company entered into a strategic relationship with PTC in 2010, and currently uses a wide variety of PTC products, including ProE/Creo, Windchill ProjectLink, Windchill PDMLink, WQS, MathCAD, Integrity, PPMLink, Arbortext, Isodraw, and Product View.
My sense is that Whirlpool is a very good example of an ideal PTC customer. Their particular combination of needs are a great match for PTC’s technology. (That may be because PTC pays attention to their customers’ needs when planning their technologies.) Two PTC technologies of special note for Whirlpool are likely to be application lifecycle management (ALM), and service lifecycle management (SLM.) I’ll be writing more about those two technologies in the near future.
While you could make an argument that Whirlpool could be as well-served by any number of other CAD programs (including SolidWorks, Inventor, and Solid Edge) as they are by ProE/Creo, I think there’s an equally strong (or stronger) counter-argument. Creo 2.0 includes some capabilities of great value to a company such as Whirlpool. The thing that comes to my mind first is integrated parametric, direct, and organic subdivision surface shape modeling. But the hot ticket is the new Creo 2.0 Options Modeler, which, when coupled with Windchill, is the no-brainer choice for building multiple product variants on a single platform.
