Against the backdrop of historic labor market and supply chain challenges, the growth of engineering projects in the U.S. has not slowed. This is also true for PROSTEP Group's upcoming projects into 2022. Customers have been planning their projects for a long time, and their digitization efforts are still necessary to achieve company objectives.
A byproduct of the pandemic for PROSTEP, Inc. was the realization that our employees are happier and more productive overall when they work remotely. We have fully decentralized our workforce and introduced industry-leading flexible work schedules, vacation time, and other work-life balance benefits. Our employees' increased confidence, flexibility and loyalty are an important part of our success. Many of them have been with the company for over 10 years.
Our customers have also embraced remote work and consulting because it has allowed us to provide them with the best resources more quickly. Face-to-face meetings are still an important part of our operations, but they are now more focused on specific aspects of a project, resulting in greater productivity.
In 2021, PROSTEP, Inc. realized a good mix of integration projects (connecting PLM, simulation, MES and ERP systems) and PLM migration projects, triggered by acquisitions, mergers and divestments or the complete replacement of existing systems. In the process, we were involved in very different industries. PROSTEP's commercial integration platform OpenPDM, which enables full bidirectional interoperability between systems from different manufacturers (Siemens, Dassault Systems, PTC, ARAS and others), was intensively used in these projects.