BigLever Partners with Method Park to Bring New Generation Product Line Engineering Innovation to Germany

Method Park, the German expert in software and systems engineering and process management solutions, and BigLever Software, the leading provider of product line engineering (PLE) solutions with headquarters in Austin/Texas, announced today that the companies have established a partnership. By combining BigLever’s industry-standard Gears PLE solution, new generation PLE methods and deployment expertise with Method Park’s in-depth process management expertise and tools, the companies will enable mutual customers to realize the order-of-magnitude efficiency, productivity and time-to-market gains delivered by PLE.

“As German manufacturers in automotive and other industries are challenged to deliver highly sophisticated products with ever-greater feature diversity, they are looking for ways to dramatically reduce engineering and operational complexity,” said Dr. Charles Krueger, BigLever Software CEO. “This has resulted in rapidly growing demand for a new paradigm of variation and complexity management. PLE has emerged to fill this need. BigLever is excited to join forces with Method Park to bring the latest PLE innovations to the German market.”

Prof. Dr. Bernd Hindel, Method Park CEO adds: “Customers will profit tremendously from the cooperation between BigLever and Method Park. With this partnership we’re able to combine our expertise and our solutions to best address the growing need for Product Line Engineering and support our customer base even more quickly and efficiently through the well-orchestrated introduction of systematic variant management.“

PLE addresses the problems of product complexity and variant management by dramatically simplifying the creation, delivery, maintenance, and evolution of a product line portfolio. BigLever's Gears PLE solution enables a unified variation management approach across the full engineering and operations lifecycle using automated, feature-based production and engineering asset sharing. Method Park’s Stages Process Management Suite and variant management process consulting services enables organizations to model the associated PLE processes for automated PLE workflow.

The BigLever / Method Park partnership will allow the companies to combine these capabilities and areas of expertise to help customers improve cross-functional communication and collaboration, break down organizational silos, and more effectively manage product variation – from product line portfolio planning to engineering, manufacturing, sales, and maintenance.

About BigLever Software
BigLever Software, Inc., the leading provider of systems and software product line engineering solutions and services, dramatically simplifies the creation, evolution, maintenance and delivery of a product line – a portfolio of similar products or systems with variations in features and functions. BigLever’s patented Gears solution enables organizations to reduce development costs and bring new product line features and products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target and hit strategic market windows. BigLever has played an instrumental role in the industry’s most notable PLE success stories across a spectrum of sectors including automotive, aerospace and defense, aviation systems, alternative energy, e-commerce, and computer systems. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.biglever.com .

For further information please contact:
Cathy Martin                     Diane Pardes
BigLever Software             Pardes Communications, LLC
Tel. +1 (512) 565-4612     Tel. +1 (781) 652-8059
cmartin(at)biglever.com        dpardes(at)pardescommunications.com

About Method Park
For many years Method Park has successfully offered consulting in questions of software for safety-critical systems in the automotive industry and in the medical technology area, for which the company develops its own software solutions. Method Park brings extensive know-how to fields with high and extremely high safety requirements. With this knowledge Method Park offers its customers a variety of solutions from a single source that contribute to the success of each company.
Method Park is the competent partner for consulting, coaching, training, engineering services and products for all questions of software development processes. The "Stages" Web-based process management portal developed by Method Park supports users with the practical implementation of development processes. Stages ensures the realization of predefined quality standards and process models and can be integrated in all common development environments. Furthermore, Stages enables the global distribution of development tasks beyond corporate boundaries.
Founded in Erlangen in 2001, Method Park employs around 125 persons at sites in Erlangen, Munich and Stuttgart, as well as in Detroit and Miami in the USA.

For further information please contact:
Philipp Donnert, Marketing
Method Park Holding AG, Wetterkreuz 19a, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Tel. +49 9131 97206-285, Fax +49 9131 97206-280
Philipp.Donnert(at)methodpark.de     www.methodpark.de