In a world where appliances last ten years and we replace our phones every two, it’s unusual to run into a company that produces components to last more than a quarter century. And with no maintenance required!
At RAB lighting in Northvale, NJ, engineers specialize in creating long-lasting, low-maintenance LED lighting for household, institutional, and industrial use.
The company’s fixtures—whether you use them to light the front entry or the side of a dam—operate for 100,000 hours (think 10 hours a day for 27+ years) before the light output dips noticeably (measured as anything below 70% of their initial value).
“But even at 70%, the LEDs are still going strong, with a difference that is only subtly discernible to the human eye,” notes the RAB website. The takeaway? These lights will be around a long time.
RAB also designs its products so they look good and meet customer requirements for a long time, too. Flood lights, area lights, decorative, vandal proof? Have you thought about the beam angle? Will you need a sensor with that?
There’s a lot to consider before you install a fixture that’s likely to stay in place for a generation or more. In the video for one product alone, you’ll see options for light color, mounting, finishes, light color, and more.
The design process and technology
To make sure the company offers what users want, RAB Lighting starts by designing with PTC Creo and PTC Mathcad. PTC Creo is a scalable interactive suite of design software – it includes the most powerful and flexible 3D CAD software on the market. While PTC Mathcad is math software that allows engineers to solve, analyze, and share their most vital engineering calculations. To manage it all, RAB Lighting enlists PTC PLM Cloud.
The PTC solution provides product lifecycle management for small- to medium-sized businesses, helping them effectively share data and collaborate with their teams and users. Based on PTC Windchill, a proven technology with over 1.5 million seats, PTC PLM Cloud allows engineers to vault product data, control access, and automate processes—so they can better manage, analyze and monitor their work.
And because it’s on the cloud, the PTC PLM solution works as a subscription (SaaS), without requiring any of the significant upfront investment in time, people, or hardware you used to hear about for enterprise PLM systems. Instead, the team at RAB Lighting just links over the internet to a secure, instant, production-ready PLM system in which the IT is all configured, optimized, and managed remotely by PTC’s experts.
The result is a sophisticated enterprise-like software solution that you don’t have to invest enterprise-size resources to deploy.
“Our main objective when deciding for PTC PLM Cloud was to have a central repository of up-to-date product information and efficient delivery of that data to customers and technical support staff, but at the same time to minimize the burden on IT while maintaining a predictable monthly cost,” says Vinny Guercio, VP Engineering, RAB Lighting. How’s it working so far? “PTC PLM Cloud is meeting our goals,” says Guercio.
Want to hear more about how RAB Lighting implemented and utilises Cloud PLM? Join us for a webinar titled: ‘Flexible Deployment Options for PLM‘, which will take place on Wed 4 July at 2pm BST (GMT +1).
