This has been a scary time for everybody. We at PTC are concerned about our customers – both the health of your employees and the health of your business – as well as our own employees. We have made a number of changes to better serve both internally and externally during this period of disruption and are committed to work together to get through this crisis.

Keeping People Safe is Our Number One Priority

On the people front, PTC has implemented numerous containment measures to protect our employees and customers from acquiring or spreading the COVID-19 virus. We’ve also built in new communication avenues to ensure that our employees stay informed and connected while they’re apart. We believe that with these measures in place, we can continue to effectively serve the needs of your business for as long as necessary until the crisis passes. Some of our actions include:

• Requiring all PTC employees globally to work from home.
• Restricting all international travel and all but the most essential domestic travel.
• Closing our Corporate Experience Center (CXC) and cancelling all physical events.
• Ensuring our Our Customer Success, Technical Support, and Cloud Services teams stand ready to remotely assist customers at any time, in any region.
• Airing weekly, live Q&A sessions for employees with myself and other executives to keep our workforce informed and answer any questions they may have.
• Creating regular surveys and touch points with employees to help inform best practices and ensure that our global workforce feel supported and have the resources they need.

How We Are Helping Our Customers

Knowing that many of our industrial customers are implementing similar containment measures in their own businesses, and realizing how disruptive these measures can be, we have been proactively implementing new policies to help our customers continue to be productive with our software solutions during this crisis. We are pleased to have offered the following:

• The highest level of “white glove” support to our many medical device and health-tech customers who are on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19.

• Free access to Vuforia Chalk augmented reality (AR) remote support and collaboration technology through at least June to help customers provide technical support to their manufacturing and service employees, as well as customers.

• Convening LiveWorx this year as a free one-day virtual event on Tuesday, June 9 so that customers do not feel the need to send employees in person to this industry events but can instead hear the latest about PTC’s products, including some great examples of how customers are using our technologies in the war against COVID-19, from wherever they are.

• Free access to our Onshape SaaS CAD solution, plus the associated learning resources, to high schools and universities that wish to offer collaborative virtual STEM and 3D CAD classes to students learning at home to help with the turmoil that exists in the education system right now.

• Free access to PTC’s eLearning suite for the duration of the crisis so that, in cases where work disruption of any form should create downtime for your employees, your employees can use this time to upskill their capabilities and return to work with an advanced level of proficiency and capability.

• Creation of a customer resource center on our website designed to provide general updates on our company’s response to COVID-19 that you can find here.

Providing a Helping Hand to Those in Need

Beyond our internal and external efforts to make sure our customers and employees have the support they need, our employees and company also took extra philanthropic steps to give back to communities in need and help produce lifesaving equipment that is in such short supply at these times. These include:

• Participation in broad formal consortiums, such as the VentilatorChallengeUK and nonprofit MasksOn, to help create and provide much-needed personal protective equipment (PPE) to healthcare facilities in need.
• Continuing opportunities for employees to support their local communities through both our employee match program, designed to match employee monetary donations to many nonprofits, and volunteer day off program, which gives employees two extra paid time off days every fiscal year to dedicate to giving back to their community.

This is an unprecedented situation, and it continues to change daily, so we will continue to do our best to respond to the changes. Please be safe, and we’ll continue to look for ways that we can help you remain productive across your product development, manufacturing, and service operations.

Paula Hudson, Senior Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Specialist