Transcript from Video:

Today, products that we make save around 30,000 lives. We mitigate about 300,000 injuries. We're looking at increasing that number dramatically. My name is Joe Borland. I work here at Veoneer.

Veoneer is a high-tech company that makes safety equipment and sensors for cars. We have sites in 13 different countries. We have eight manufacturing centers and about 17 tech centers around the world, so we're fairly broad. We have about 7,000 associates working for the company right now, 4,000 of those are engineering that work on various products, whether it be our radar products, our vision products, our night vision products, all of our active safety line, or our passive safety line, our traditional airbag controllers and safety products. People want to be able to trust this technology. They want to feel like they're in tune and that at the end of the day, whatever they have in the vehicle that we put there is reliable.

Altium enterprise solutions for us took over from DMS, which is the Mentor tool. What was an advantage for us is that Altium enterprise solutions allow us to do better project management, and a better management of the boards. For the most part, we took Altium as much as we put out of the box. Configuration is part of the tool, and that's going to be with any tool. So, when it came to the Altium enterprise solutions, the topologies, the parameters, and all those things, those were all injected from Veoneer. But we already had a model, so we kind of just copied from the model we had.

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The cost factors between the two make sense if you're looking at your overall return on investment. You're probably looking at about a 10-time investment to implement a DMS global system, which doesn't give you the performance you need and doesn't manage projects. The designs in our old solution were very large and bloated. This tool allows us to move those designs fairly rapidly into the vaulting process, because they're about one tenth of the size of the previous solutions we had. Altium enterprise solutions, one-tenth the cost and giving you that speed of operation.

Because of the cost of ownership, we're able to expand. We're able to get it to more people and add licenses that we need to as we grow. We're growing very rapidly to try to meet the demands of our projects, and our technology is advancing daily. So, the other portion of it is we found that there's a lot more folks out there familiar with the Altium product than the Mentor product.

Since we've gone to Altium, we've actually added three new eCAD designers along the way, so we're rapidly expanding here in Veoneer. We need that help, and we found that people can adapt to the product. Because the tool's in one cockpit, one user interface, users are able to learn one peer part of it and adapt that part to the other portions of the tool. So, whether it be library management, schematic capture, or PCB, they're able to use that one kind of unified cockpit, as opposed to having to learn, "This tool works this way. This tool works this way. This tool works that way."

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One of the things and reasons we invested in Altium was the 3D capability. It's superior to anything else we've seen on the market, and our new products are relying on a lot more interaction between the mechanical and the electrical world, that packaging portion of the design. We make break controllers, which have to fit inside of these elaborate housings that need to wrap around a hydraulic module. And so when you talk about that kind of packaging, more mechanical-electrical challenges. 

And I think, to be honest with you, the ease or the ways that parts are designed, the footprint and the symbols are much simpler. They're integrated right into the tool and the development of those, so this is the vantage there. We are getting that speed of being able to develop those components, getting to the users faster than we were when we had Mentor.

The reason we changed was the direction that I see Altium going in, these quantum leaps. I see a lot of investment in R&D, a lot of technology coming out within Altium, and that they're focused on PCB design. It's all about PCBs all day, every day. How do we make this easier for users across the whole spectrum, not just routing, but schematic capture, part creation, board layout, output package, the whole gamut?