Westford, MA September 25, 2002 Engineering firm Oceaneering International builds products that go up to the dark vacuum of outer space and down to the bottom of the Seven Seas. But to maintain its edge, Oceaneering currently is venturing into product lifecycle management (PLM) right here on dry land.
Founded in 1964, $524 million Oceaneering provides engineered products and services for customers who operate in marine, space and other harsh environments. Among other things, the company produces a toolkit for fixing the Hubble telescope and a coring unit for collecting sediment samples from the ocean floor.
The Houston-based company recently elected to adopt a PLM solution from provider MatrixOne in a bid to facilitate their engineer-to-order business for product and process collaboration.
"In the highly competitive engineer-to-order and build-to-order environment in which we operate, our ability to have complete control over, and immediate access to, documents and part data during the design phase is critical to our continued success," said Dan Jolly, vice president and general manager of Oceaneering Intervention Engineering (OIE), the division that initially is rolling out the solutions.
Oceaneering will implement MatrixOne's eMatrix product collaboration platform and Value Chain Portfolio applications, including Engineering Central, DocuManagement Central, Team Central, Supplier Central and Sourcing Central.
"These MatrixOne solutions, combined with MatrixOne packaged integrations for Solidworks, Autocad, Pro/ENGINEER and Microsoft Office, will provide an information backbone to enable Oceaneering&to improve configuration control," said Gregg Farris, vice president information technology at the manufacturer.
"The deep integrations that MatrixOne provides to our existing technology investments, combined with their extensible solution set for managing products across their entire lifecycle, will enable our company to achieve levels of supply chain collaboration beyond what was possible with our existing eHub system," added Jolly.
Moving forward, the company plans to expand its deployment of the PLM solutions as part of a strategy to collaborate more efficiently externally with key customers and suppliers and internally across globally distributed facilities. "Oceaneering's continued rapid and successful growth is predicated on being able to meet the advanced technology needs of the diverse clientele that we service," noted Farris.
"MatrixOne's combination of strong integrations and a flexible PLM solution set will provide Oceaneering with the collaborative platform it needs so that both employees and external suppliers can be closely linked with their design processes," said Don Hunt, senior vice president of field operations for MatrixOne.
For more information on product lifecycle management, see the Global Enabled Supply Chain Series article in the October/November 2002 issue of iSource Business.
