KAB Seating Builds IT Strategy on Microsoft Technologies

Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) and SmarTeam Corporation Ltd., a Dassault Systèmes company announced a plan by KAB Seating Ltd. (www.kabseating.com) of the United Kingdom to extend its SMARTEAM Product Lifecycle Management solution, based on Microsoft technologies, to interoperate with the Microsoft Business Solutions - Axapta enterprise resource planning product, one of Microsoft's business application suites.

"We have deployed SMARTEAM PLM widely, managing all our engineering data across product development, sales and throughout our organization," said Dave Farrar, manufacturing systems manager at KAB.

SmarTeam builds its enterprise solutions on Microsoft .NET technologies - including Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and Active Directory directory service - to provide high availability, scalability, performance, enhanced security and support for open standards.

"Microsoft technology is positioned to become the standard across the manufacturing industry," said Charles Johnson, worldwide managing director of manufacturing industry solutions at Microsoft.

"By recognizing the need to unlock data trapped in disparate systems, SmarTeam has built on Microsoft's integrated platform to provide manufacturing customers with powerful PLM solutions that optimize and automate processes while improving communication and collaboration across the enterprise."

The mobile machinery and automotive supplier's use of SMARTEAM PLM and Microsoft technologies will be showcased at ECF, Oct. 12-14, in Paris.