Networking and More

Do you want to maximize the utilization of digital data across departments and on the shop floor? This session discussed how to make a paperless environment easier to navigate through the use of Creo View and Windchill. Design annotation and collaboration are possible with help from combination states. By using both Windchill and Creo View viewables, a more intimate knowledge of the product is furnished and allows for improved dialogue between Manufacturing, Integration and Design. Joining forces between Creo, Windchill, and Creo View affords a significant savings in time by leveraging state-of-the-art tools to more accurately convey design intent and change. Specific topics discussed included combination state authoring, mark-up capability, viewing Windchill meta-data in Creo View, and a series of tips to allow for a seamless Creo View user experience.

This session was a no-nonsense approach to achieving complete configuration management without spending millions customizing  Windchill. The presenter offered sound advice to companies wanting to implement configuration management that are considering using Windchill for this purpose. Case studies and related experiences, coupled with in-depth familiarity with using Windchill were demonstrated why Windchill out of the box is more than capable of real and complete configuration management. The presenter shared a number of experiences to illustrate the idea of  customizing Windchill is not only expensive, but usually results in hobbled software that cannot be used to achieve configuration management. If your company has already installed and customized Windchill, and experienced unsatisfactory results have ensued, it may be the best thing to wipe all the disc drives clean, start again, and learn how to really use Windchill out of the box.

Windchill 11 presents a fresh look at PLM -- one that is focused on creating and leveraging smart, connected products. So what is next for PLM? Building on advancements in the current version of Windchill, this session discussed the roadmap and strategy for the PLM business at PTC, including new features in upcoming maintenance releases and beyond -- including a future vision for PLM at PTC and in the marketplace.

You’re developing hundreds to thousands of new products every year and spending millions of dollars in the process. How do you know what those new products should be? How should they be priced? How much should you produce or buy? First Insight along with Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Ryan Miller, Director of Business Systems and Sourcing, discussed how Dick’s is using First Insight to listen to the Voice of the Customer in their product decision-making process and increasing speed to market of the right branded and private label items. The session provided a preview of the future of smart, connected retail powered by First Insight, Windchill FlexPLM, and ThingWorx IoT.

Attendees heard about the exciting new direct modeling enhancements in Creo 4.0, including flexible modeling in standard and sheet metal mode as well as in Creo Direct 4.0.

Attendee heard about the exciting new enhancements in Creo 4.0 in the area of 3D printing.

Attendees heard about the exciting new enhancements in Creo 4.0 in the area of MDB & 2D detailing.

Drawings have been the mainstay of engineering communication and production control since the 18th Century, and many engineering processes still revolve around the principles established through drawing control. Today's leading manufacturing companies are transforming their process from drawing-centric to part-centric, shifting information from drawings into Windchill in order to alleviate bottlenecks and the chore of multiple data entry inherent in a drawing-centric process. In this session, the presenter shared best practices for managing essential information such as Bills of Material in a part-centric approach.

A well-tuned system is critical for companies to derive value from using Windchill. This session shared information on how best to deploy and tune a Windchill system. The presenter provided tips and techniques on how to monitor, troubleshoot and fix performance problems when they arise.

Updates in ISO 9001:2015 emphasize traceability, collaboration, and risk management throughout the product development process. In this session, attendees learned about harmonized product development and quality processes in Windchill that enable companies in highly regulated industries like medical devices to address ISO 9001:2015 updates with one PLM solution. With capabilities to manage changes throughout the product lifecycle, to trace the impact of those changes in quality feedback systems, and to address quality issues with not just corrective measures but preventive ones supported throughout the design and development process. Windchill meets the recommendations of the new standard to close the loop on product quality and product development.

Finding the perfect method for managing and synchronizing your ECAD, MCAD and Windchill library data synchronization can take a village! While collaboration benefits sound great, the devil, as they say, is in the details. For both ECAD-MCAD collaboration and ECAD-Windchill integration, component libraries must be separately created and maintained. However to work effectively, the associated libraries and meta data must be merged. This panel discussion which included a customer and ECAD vendor discuss how to approach each of the above, what was learned during implementation and their future plans.

Business rules and workflow enhancements can streamline otherwise complicated processes, reducing delays and excess work. Panelists from AGCO, NASA, TE Connectivity and Raytheon shared ways they have used business rules to tackle challenging change management, configuration management and data management processes and how you can apply these tactics within your own organization.

Attendees learned about the exciting new enhancements in Creo 4.0 in the area of cabling, piping and schematics.

During PTC University training classes, instructors learn about the daily challenges of PTC customers and discuss solutions to their specific problems. Very often, these challenges are not unique - there are many questions that are being asked repeatedly. During this session the presenter did a deep dive around working with complex models and large assemblies. The presenter discussed the most frequently asked questions from his Creo classes and suggested useful tips to improve productivity. Topics included how to run simple structural analysis and fast ways to conduct part level editing while in assemblies.

The presenter discussed how they were able to build the first 5-axis 3D-printed electronic tool by integrating nine hardware and software components: Konica-Minolta Range 7 3D laser scanner, Keyence laser distance sensor, Rapidform XOR3 software, Creo 3.0 Parametric, Creo 3.0 Manufacturing, Haas OM2A CNC Office Mill, Norson/EFD dispenser/print head and controller and Spectra Physics sintering laser. The presenter shared why the Creo product was the main key that made this printing tool integration possible. And with the Creo Manufacturing tool loaded with so many features, all types of printing was done seamlessly with minimum effort. From this effort, the presenter demonstrated how Creo Parametric and Creo Manufacturing can be the standard printing software for the 3D-printed electronics field by doing both substractive and additive manufacturing. Finally, the presenter demonstrated how Creo software and Haas CNC can be used as a pick-and-place machine to place electrical component on

Multiple views of a single source of truth for product data can be represented by the "xBOM" in Windchill. Maintaining a single source of truth for product data and processes across a product's lifecycle - spanning engineering (eBOM), manufacturing (mBOM), and service (sBOM) - helps companies share data across these disparate teams, ensures  teams do not get out of synch with changes and needs from one another, enhances collaboration to improve quality, and speeds time-to-market. The presenter shared how powerful new capabilities in Windchill 11 enhance the connections between each view of the BOM, flagging changes from one group to the next, and offering a highly intuitive, visual user experience to transform one bill of materials to another;  enabling this powerful collaboration that leverages a single source of truth for the product's "xBOM" throughout the lifecycle.

With so many internal IT systems used throughout the product lifecycle, how do you ensure that valuable information from a product’s design, manufacture, and service doesn’t get stuck in data silos, inaccessible to the very stakeholders who need it most? The navigate product offers one, simple, intuitive system of engagement that is as easy to use as the average smartphone app. It delivers product data from across multiple systems of record, like PLM, ALM, SLM, MES, CRM, legacy systems, and more. Out-of-the-box apps launched in December with Windchill 11 deliver PLM data to any stakeholder throughout your company who needs it, while offering easy and flexible tailoring, attractive subscription-based pricing, and extensibility to more data sources across your enterprise – including smart, connected products. By attending this session attendees learned more about the navigate product and saw a demonstration of the apps in action!

What is the next step in your business transformation? The Tuesday ISG keynote explored, the opportunities afforded by IoT and continuing innovations in this digital age are vast, and growing exponentially. What steps will your company take next across its engineering, manufacturing, and service teams to realize new business value from these growing opportunities?  A panel of business leaders in engineering, manufacturing, and service organizations from PTC’s top customers discussed their own journeys of transformation to realizing new levels of business value in this increasingly digital age.

Daktronics identified the lack of a classification system as being one of the root causes  of organizational waste the company wanted to address in their PLM Deployment. The session discussed the Daktronics journey on how they deployed their classification system. The presenters discussed the number of  adjustments made to the scope and the development of the strategy, some of the challenges of dealing with free format text data, and the unique ideas identify to achieve organizational visibility and traction.

The session discussed the top ten improvements made to Windchill from an administrator’s perspective. The presenter discussed both the system and business administrative areas including promotion tools, application clustering and high availability, system monitoring, performance advisor, user administration and reporting.

As GE is becoming a Digital Industrial company, digital thread and product lifecycle management are becoming essential. Establishing a digital thread from the Mechanical/Electrical CAD BOMs to the Engineering BOM and through to the Manufacturing BOM in a Multi-CAD environment is a tricky business. The presenters walked through the GE Aviation Systems implementation of a BOM management solution. The session provided an overview of how GE Aviation Systems has begun to establish the digital thread including an overview of an internally developed tool to enable a digital thread solution without breaking the production processes. In addition to these learning objectives, the presenters presented a roadmap including details on current and future implementations (ECAD management, MCAD management and linkages to eBOMs.).

Whirlpool has strategically acquired companies to achieve product leadership in the home appliance domain. Recent acquisitions and a joint venture have resulted in integrating 3 different CAD platforms and PLM systems in Whirlpool’s native Creo and Windchill PLM platform. By attending this session attendees heard how Whirlpool approached this integration by analyzing various approaches and options in CAD interoperability so they could successfully devise an approach and methodology to handle current requirements and take care of anticipated future integrations.

PTC is expanding capabilities to process our customer’s data to proactively send solutions, predict where problems may occur, and prevent issues from happening at all. The result is products are more stable and PTC Product Users are more productive. How is this possible? This session discussed how PTC is bringing data analytics and machine learning to their products.

The presenters discussed how the architecture design process is a core element of the product development process at MAN Truck & Bus AG. During this design process phase, the technical concept responding to the functional specification takes shape, and the product structure is completed and enriched with its contents. As all of MAN’s products are configured from a consequently designed modular kit, the variants are based on this product architecture.

Windchill 11is the first production-ready enterprise solution launched by PTC that is powered by ThingWorx to deliver new capabilities beyond any other PLM offering on the marketplace: to create smart, connected products and to leverage the information they generate. In this practical, technology-driven session, the presenter examined why IoT is PLM and how new technologies and services both offered in Windchill 11 today and in-work in our R&D are delivering on this promise. This session showcased  "concept  apps" demonstrating powerful engineering use cases that connect PLM with the IoT.