Empowering customers - its what we do!

Having been a technical specialist with Mentor Graphics for a little over 7 years now.  I work with a great group of people and we have had some great successes.  I was recently asked after our latest account win what made the customer choose Mentor Graphics?

This is a question I was unable to answer straight away.  On the surface we have products to sell that they want to buy, but that is really too superficial.  They have problems that our software can solve for them.  Well, sure, but that isn’t really it.

I believe the real reason we have had success with the Capital Harness Systems products is because they empower the customers.  No longer are customers looking at tools as if they are commodities - tools are enterprise applications that provide critical functionality and more importantly information to the right people at the right time.  As an example, I will outline a recent situation.  The customer was typical mil-aero - using drafting tools to capture connectivity, sending paper copies of these manually drafted documents to harness engineers, who in turn used other drafting tools to re-enter the data again in another format.  These drawings were then printed and someone else created a spreadsheet - again manually - that contained a list of all of the wires and where all the wires went from and to in the harness.  Someone else had a database where they again manually entered a list of parts so they could order them.

This might sound horrible - but this is a good company and they make excellent products - but of course they do a lot of design iterations and validation to ensure someone didn’t type something wrong.  And if there is a change you can get the picture that there are a lot of documents to be touched.

Enter Mentor Graphics.  We listened to management and asked them, tools aside, what were their problems and what they would like to see happen.  Obviously being able to spend less time checking drawings or fixing harnesses after they have been built was high on their list.  Capital Harness Systems empowered the management team to set and track real metrics against the data.  They were finally able to create robust processes that limited manual entry of data entirely.  Engineer’s were now, to quote “able to engineer instead of typing things into a spreadsheet”.

This is what keeps me at Mentor Graphics and why I enjoy my job - I get to empower people to do their jobs better, faster and with less error than ever before.

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