Engineers at passenger-jet manufacturer Airbus in Toulouse, France, needed a software application to design their new A380 airplane. They found a solution with Windchill product life cycle management (PLM) software from Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC) in Needham, Mass.

Airbus designers use the software to collaborate with customers and suppliers while developing variants of the A380 passenger and freighter aircraft lines. This new capability helps to shorten manufacturing lead times and enables closer conformance to customer requirements.

“Airbus has become the benchmark in innovative and collaborative aerospace engineering and manufacturing. PTC is proud to partner with them in their strategic use of our PLM solutions,” says Dick Harrison, president and CEO of PTC.

They use Windchill as the product data- management system to share digital mock-ups (DMUs), and manage CAD drawings developed by a distributed product development team. DMU is a key element of the Airbus Concurrent Engineering (ACE) initiative, a systematic approach to aircraft development in a virtual 3-D environment. For more information, see www.ptc.com.