Caterpillar has many business divisions. Each of these business divisions was using PTC's Pro-E CAD tools. The data was being managed with a mixture of Pro-PDM and Pro/Intralink tools. Both tools were workgroup level management tools. PTC's engagement had many issues which had existed for many months and the confidence in the tools was under threat. PTC needed to get the engagement under control to ensure that Caterpillar could realize the full ROI potential of the tools and establish a foundation to brow the engagement to address enterprise level issues.
PTC established a Customer Program Management Team and engaged durectly with the central corporate CAD Management Team at Caterpillar. Through a regular weekly cadence of face to face meetings with this central team and other cadence meetings with the business unit CAD focus groups we were able to bring the engagement under control by categorizing the 400 plus issues that had been logged by Caterpillar into various levels of seriousness with commitments from PTC R&D to show significant progress on each of the 'Critical' issues on a weekly basis. In a very short time we had turned a hostile situation into a cooperative engagement and were able to negotiate additional software sales in the account.
Caterpillar was PTC's first large customer and, at the time, was their largest worldwide user of Pro-E. The account had not had the attention that it needed but with focused customer success management activities by the account team we were able to re-establish the relationships for future growth activities
I was the PTC Program Director for the account during this time and was responsible for designing and implementing the recovery plan. I had a team of Project Managers and Implementation Consultants to address the issues on the ground and was also able to negotiate priorities with PTC R&D and get their commitments to address a rolling list of 16 critical issues and make progress on a weekly basis. We quickly got the list of 400 issues under control and were able to significantly reduce this number to a manageable level.
