Simon designs and manufactures electrical switches, sockets, lighting, and connectivity solutions for markets across the globe. With over 200 engineers based in Barcelona and China, and manufacturing plants operating in Brazil, Mexico, India, and Poland, the company runs a genuinely international product development operation. A decision made in Barcelona has direct consequences on a factory floor thousands of kilometres away.
Keeping engineering and manufacturing aligned at that scale is not a given. It requires more than a good PLM system. It requires that the people who need engineering data can actually get to it, reliably, and without depending on someone else to retrieve it for them.
That was the problem Simon needed to solve.
The situation before Viewer
Simon’s engineering team works in PTC Windchill. Their product data, assemblies, components, drawings and specifications, is structured, versioned, and controlled inside the PLM environment. But Windchill access was limited to the engineering team. Manufacturing teams at international sites had no direct, reliable way to consult that data.
The result was a gap between what engineering knew and what manufacturing could act on. Errors were surfacing too late, at the manufacturing phase, when the cost of fixing them is significantly higher than catching them upstream. An initial attempt to bridge this with PTC Navigate View licenses proved difficult to scale across a geographically distributed organization with multiple sites, each with its own operational reality.
Something more flexible was needed.
The solution: ISFsoft Viewer as the access layer
ISFsoft Viewer was implemented in combination with PTC Navigate View, providing a dedicated visualization server that makes Windchill data accessible to non-engineering teams, without requiring PLM licenses or expertise.
A Windchill workflow was configured to publish data automatically to the Viewer server, distributing up-to-date engineering information from Barcelona to manufacturing plants in Brazil, Mexico, India, and Poland. The moment engineering updates something in Windchill, that change becomes available to every site through Viewer.
The rollout was gradual and site-driven. Rather than imposing a uniform change across four countries at once, each manufacturing plant defined its own adoption timeline and product strategy. This meant the implementation could flex around operational realities, reducing friction and accelerating actual adoption on the ground.
The results across 150 users
With ISFsoft Viewer in place, manufacturing teams at every site now have direct access to current engineering data. The impact has been visible across several dimensions.
Error discovery moved upstream. Manufacturing teams can now identify issues before they reach the production floor, reducing the cost and disruption of rework. The engineering team, no longer fielding data access requests from across four time zones, recovered significant capacity.
And for the first time, every site, Barcelona, Brazil, Mexico, India, Poland, is working from the same version of the truth.
But the most significant outcome may be structural. With Viewer providing a reliable, shared view of engineering data across the organization, Simon had the foundation it needed to go further: moving from folder-based project management to a structured, Windchill-based PLM approach. Viewer was not just a fix for the access problem. It was the trigger for a broader shift in how Simon manages its product data at a global level.
A bridge that scales
What the Simon implementation illustrates is a pattern that applies across manufacturing organizations of similar complexity: the value of a PLM system is not just in the data it holds, but in how accessible that data is to the people who need to act on it.
ISFsoft Viewer connects to Windchill and exposes the relevant data, assemblies, components, drawings and attributes, through an interface that manufacturing, quality, procurement, and other teams can use without training, without licenses, and without creating risk to the PLM environment. For multi-site organizations, it also solves the synchronization problem by design: one source, one published view, always current.
Does your manufacturing team have direct access to Windchill data?
If your engineering team is the gatekeeper of data that manufacturing, quality, or procurement need to do their work, ISFsoft Viewer is designed to change that, without disrupting your existing PLM environment.
Explore ISFsoft Viewer →
More real-world examples
Simon is one of several manufacturing companies that have transformed the way they connect engineering and production with ISFsoft. Explore more case studies to see how other teams are getting more out of their Windchill investment.