London — March 20, 2003 — Dutch Vanderlande Industries has tapped Dassault Systemes company SmarTeam Corp. to provide an enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) solution in a bid to improve product data management and to create links with suppliers and subcontractors.
Vanderlande is a provider of advanced material handling and supply chain systems for distribution centers, airport baggage handling operations, sorting centers for express parcel services and the manufacturing industry. SmarTeam's SMARTEAM PLM solution will be implemented by systems integrator infostrait for use by up to 750 Vanderlande staff, with full functionality intended within two years.
The implementation will begin with integrated product data management across the engineering and customer-interfacing departments, including document and product structure management, and integration with existing applications and databases. This will be followed by interoperability with suppliers, subcontractors and co-developers, and linking in customer projects at various international locations.
"A material handling system is like a puzzle," said Peter Loonen, managing director of Vanderlande. "We chose SMARTEAM because it gives us the PLM capabilities necessary to control the different parts of the puzzle, from managing [research and development] and equipment design data to exchanging information across our extended enterprise."
"Companies such as Vanderlande accumulate a mass of product data that can be difficult, time-consuming and costly to manage," explained Chris Jones, president of European operations at SmarTeam. "PLM will enable Vanderlande to manage its data across the whole enterprise with much greater efficiency, visibility and speed."
SmarTeam said that Vanderlande's choice of its PLM solution followed a lengthy selection process on such criteria as compatibility with user requirements, need for customization, cost, scalability, maturity and anticipated life expectancy of the software, vision on PLM evolution, quality of the reference sites, as well as the experience and skills of the implementation partner.
