As companies look to evolve from a simple engineering CAD data management environment to a fully integrated PLM strategy, they are often faced with two major challenges. The first is organizing and displaying the data from multiple systems in one tool focused on the context of a Part (Part Centric) so that the entire enterprise speaks a common language. The second is making all the part centric data available for consumption to the casual user without them getting lost in an overwhelming user interface, tailored for the power user. At Raytheon, like most companies, the environment reflects the company's history of growth through mergers and acquisitions as well as the evolution of technology. The result is a heterogeneous technical environment that utilizes a variety of different vendor tools to manage all the various aspects of delivering and supporting the products (product development, supply chain management, manufacturing planning,…). This leads to having part data such as Performance Attributes, Material Compliance, Cost, Inventory, Producibility Ratings, Industry Alerts, Obsolescence, Quality,… being disconnected and hard to access in one central location. In this session, Raytheon shared how they intend to use the ThingWorx platform to overcome the challenges of creating an Enterprise PLM Part Centric Strategy. The presenters discussed how the use of role based applications can be used to enable the simplification of the Windchill User Interface.
