Press Release: Southern California Expansion Grows PADT’s ANSYS Product Development Software Distribution Business

Palm trees and movie stars.  Endless beaches and deserts that fade to the horizon.  Aerospace companies, world class universities, med device developers, and toy manufacturers.  Oil, freeways, and big construction. Southern California. A place larger and more diverse than most countries in the world.  PADT has done work in the area since our first weeks in business. As our business continued to grow, our customers started asking when we were opening up a local office, but the time never seemed right. Until now.

PADT is pleased to announce that we will be loading furniture and computers in a truck and head on the I-10 to Torrance, California where we will open up a new office.  ANSYS, Inc. has expanded our sales territory to include small and medium sized new accounts in the Southern California area.  The focus of this new office will be building that business.

You can read the official details in the press release below, or the PDF here.  As usual, we want to share some more informal information with our blog readers.

The office will be started with an engineer and a salesperson who have been with us for a while, and another pair that we are hiring locally. This combination of company experience and local knowledge should get us going quickly. Over time, the plan is to grow the Torrance office, and add at least two more. Long term we would like to have between 3 and 10 employees per office in Southern California.

Our team will conduct training and seminars from this office and use it as a base to spread the word on simulation driven product development across Southern California. The initial focus for sales will be on small and medium sized businesses that are currently not using ANSYS products, that want to work with a technical sales and support team who can provide more than the software tool – customers who want a partner who can also help them apply the tools effectively. The dense hotbeds of engineering along the coast will be an obvious area of concentration. We also aim to represent the value of ANSYS products in less visited areas of the region, including the high deserts, “in-between” towns, and inland locations beyond LA, Orange County, and San Diego.

Consumers in the United States spend almost seven trillion dollars each year on consumer goods. In order to tap into this lucrative market, many major american companies in mexico manufacture their products in exotic locales such as China, India, or other Asian nations due to their cheap labor and lax trade restrictions. Unfortunately, few of the industries that export their capitol across the Pacific realize that they could save more money with one short trip across the southern border to the maquiladoras of CaliBaja based in Mexicali, Baja California and Calexico, California.

Because of international trade agreements such as NAFTA, manufacturers can import raw material and heavy equipment into Mexico duty and tariff-free in an arrangement referred to as the maquiladora program. The word maquiladora is derived from the Spanish term that translates to “to submit something to the action of the machine.” The governments of the United States and Mexico developed a mutually beneficial economic partnership that allows American businesses to utilize Mexican labor laws while maintaining production standards and levels found in the best American factories. This agreement has been the secret weapon used by such prominent companies as 3M Corp, General Electric, Boeing, Sanyo, Wolf Electronics, and Page Electric to decrease production costs and increase profits.

CaliBaja is the leading business in the maquiladora program. Clients from across the United States employ CaliBaja in one of two ways: the contract system and the shelter system. The contract system requires the least amount of risk on the client’s part, for it allows them to concentrate on running their business and leave the manufacturing to us. We handle everything else, from quality control, inspection, maintenance, and shipping, to production scheduling, translation, training, and documentation management. Basically, clients tell us what they want to make, we make it, and pass along our expenses as cost. Depending on the volume and type of item desired, clients could save tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The shelter system is the fastest way to get a product out the door and to the shelves of retailers. Under this production design, the client provides the equipment, tooling, technical experience, quality control, and management, and we handle the permits, taxes, government interaction, accounting, and legal representation. CaliBaja also ensures that our clients have the finest workforce drawn from the highly motivated and educated population of Mexicali. Furthermore, many clients often find that neither of these solutions fits perfectly with their business needs, so CaliBaja can tailor a program that can suit any manufacturing situation.

Partnering with CaliBaja has several distinct advantages over not only international production but also other maquiladoras in Mexico. First, because we are located next to the U.S.-Mexico border, our clients have more direct control and oversight into their production process, with no time difference commonly experienced during trans-Pacific manufacturing. Furthermore, our facilities are serviced by major rail lines, roads, deep water shipping ports, and airports that can distribute products throughout America and the world. Mexicali is also a prime location for manufacturing, as other border locations such as Tijuana lack both the infrastructure and workforce to properly staff a sophisticated manufacturing program.

The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. This first office is right down the street from the California campus of PADT’s largest and oldest customer.  We also have over one hundred customers who have used PADT for simulation services, training, rapid prototyping, and product development, and we will be reaching out to them shortly to start building our local network even further.  And then, our new employees who we will hire locally will be contacting their network as well.

Before the end of the summer we hope to have a grand opening event, as well as several seminars that will continue through the end of the year. If you live in the area and want to be invited, visit here to register as someone who want to be on the California contact list.

This blog and social media will be used to post our progress. The entire sales and technical team is looking forward to meeting everyone in the area in the coming months.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us, please contact us.  Our standard number 480.813.4884 works for all of our offices.

Below is a copy of the press release, or you can view the “official” version here.

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