Symetri Appoints Fulthorpe to Head Up New Consulting Services Wing

Phil Black - PII Editor 05/01/2012

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New Unit Will Drive Business and Operational Efficiencies for Engineering Design Customers

To meet growing market demand, Symetri, a platinum partner of leading 3D design software provider, Autodesk, has launched a new business unit, Symetri Consulting Services.

The objective is to provide a more structured approach to the delivery of consulting services to customers, enabling them to optimise their use of Autodesk software and more clearly understand how it maps onto engineering design processes.

The new service will be headed up by Michael Fulthorpe, who takes on the role of business development director, Symetri Consulting Services. Fulthorpe previously spent five years working for Autodesk: first as a channel manager in the manufacturing division and then in Autodesk’s major accounts team. He began his career at Imass (now Symetri), where he was latterly business development manager.

“Michael is ideally suited to this new consulting role,” says Colin Watson, corporate director, Symetri. “He has extensive experience in sales, account management and delivering consulting services. Critically, he can quickly grasp customers’ requirements and clearly communicate back to them what we can deliver to meet their needs. This will be invaluable in his new role.”

“Of course, Michael also needs a team of highly competent engineers to support him,” adds Watson. “As a platinum partner, we are not only able to deliver this but, having built up our skills over recent years, we believe we have a team which is second to none in Autodesk’s value added chain.”

According to Fulthorpe, “we are seeing growing demand from customers of design software solutions across the manufacturing sector for a more consultative approach to the deployment and integration of this kind of technology. In setting up Symetri Consulting Services, we want to help customers fully understand their design software and optimise their usage of it. Doing this will, in turn, enable them to get their products and services to market more quickly.”

The new Symetri Consulting Services business stream will initially focus on several key areas: the integration of engineering data management systems with other downstream business systems such as ERP/MRP; helping customers adopt sales configurators or Engineer to Order Systems (ETO); Autodesk cloud based services and the implementation of dynamic simulation, CFD and FEA processes into customers engineering design workflows.

Fulthorpe says, “these are major areas where we are seeing growing demand from customers for a more consultative approach. This will involve delivering consultancy around areas like systems integration, capturing project specifications and testing technology using digital prototyping. The ultimate goal is to help the customer use technology as effectively as possible to drive business and operational efficiencies throughout the organisation.”