With seven South African motor manufacturers now using the 3D engineering and manufacturing software solution, Pro/ENGINEER, PTC - the developers of the software - has announced the deployment of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 at Toyota's Powertrain Division.

Wildfire 2.0 is the latest version of Pro/ENGINEER and, according to Charles Anderson, MD of Centurion-based Automated Reasoning - the local distributors of Pro/ENGINEER - the continued success of the ongoing project at Toyota augurs well for his company's plans to increase its presence in the local motor manufacturing industry.

"The motor manufacturing market makes up a small percentage of our total local revenue, but we are aiming to increase this to more than 30% within the next two to three years."

The solution rolls out PTC's Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 as the powertrain development standard, incorporating dozens of improvements for powertrain development, which Toyota and PTC conceived and developed over the last 18 months. The deployment is a continuation of the multiyear, joint process redesign and development initiative PTC and Toyota signed in May 2003.

Since standardising on Pro/ENGINEER for powertrain in 2002, Toyota has achieved improvements in design cycle time, introduced new lean product development techniques and furthered its established leadership in the areas of continuous improvement, quality leadership and technical innovation. "This phase - which will instil further confidence locally in Pro/ENGINEER - builds on that success by introducing innovative new PLM technology into their process in the areas of 3D engineering, analysis, manufacturing planning, drawing creation and interoperability," says Anderson.

Toyota is renowned for its absolute focus on engineering and manufacturing excellence and PTC is proud to partner with them in this strategic use of PLM technology, said Dick Harrison, president and CEO of PTC. The ability of our solutions to support and enable this undertaking is a tremendous validation of our vision, our approach and our offerings. We are confident that PTC will continue to help Toyota lead the industry in continuous process improvement.

Toyota's standardisation on Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 reinforces PTC's special focus on the powertrain segment of the transportation industry. Industry leaders such as VW, BMW, Hyundai, Fiat, Volvo Truck, Daihatsu, Hino Motors, Tata Motors, ZF, Mannesman AG, Visteon, Robert Bosch, Eaton, Dana, AVL and Cummins have selected PTC based on the business benefits provided by Pro/ENGINEER.

Pro/ENGINEER provides the power and performance required for delivering high performance products in the powertrain field while providing users with a simple, intuitive and connected experience.