I've been following this and I'm definitely in Don's camp on this.
Our current third party PDM (our solution is not really a PLM) does NOT
allow for ANY iteration deletion, and that IS the way that we want it.
Iterations in the middle are just history, and they are in there. They
don't hurt anything, except maybe making your database bigger. You do NOT
have to use them.
With all of that being said, I'm no expert on WC, and in fact we are
currently working towards our WC test bed setup.
But I have two comments in general.
1) PTC did this intentionally: I think that it's a distinct
possibility that PTC realized that they way that we WERE doing it in
Intralink by allowing iterative deletion was NOT a good idea. I have to
wonder if they weren't getting complaints from people (admins) that were
deleting things, and screwing things up, so they just took the
functionality away. As was stated earlier in this thread, you have to be
very very careful when you start deleting iterations, as it could cause
other things to fail. Even though you think that you are doing the right
thing, there could be something that you didn't account for. PDM IS all
inter-twined together, and it IS a huge jigsaw puzzle, and deleting one
seemingly insignificant piece could have dire consequences that you don't
see coming
2) Swiss army knife PLM: It's important to understand that WC is NOT
just PDM anymore, like Intralink, it's PLM. This is actually one of the
things that we LIKE about WC, and one of the reasons that we are
considering moving towards WC. For US ,and I realize that YMMV, we want
to have as much knowledge in ONE location as we can possibly get in said
location. Is that not the definition of PLM? It sure feels like this
should ultimately make us more efficient corporately, because we wouldn't
need to maintain several systems, and we would only need to train everyone
on ONE system, that being WC. But, as was stated earlier, you have to
realize that while it will do everything, it may not do all things the
best, and at the end of the day, that's OK, because the trade off is that
you get ALL information to a common point of entry / exit, and that far
outweighs, in our opinion, the maintenance involved with multiple systems.
For us, we have an ERP system. It sucks at some things, and some things
it's better at. For the things that it sucks at, we often have
work-arounds that are outside the system, and those work-arounds cause us
more headaches than they solve. They're complicated, and they are
somewhere else, so you have to leave ERP to find that answer. That is NOT
a total solution. The holy grail of PLM, I think, is to have ALL systems
tied together in one place that either share a common database, or at the
minimum can read from different databases if different functions are
controlled by different programs. If you've been to conference over the
last couple of years, I think that it's very very obvious that this is the
way that PTC is going with their PLM. They are trying to get as many of
these systems tied together as is possible, and I don't think that's a bad
thing. I also think that it's a matter of time before has, acquires, or
is ACQUIRED by an ERP vendor. At that point, think about how powerful WC
would be IF it was a one stop - do all ENTERPRISE wide system PRODUCT
LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT system.
There was a post on here recently about which should drive which, PLM vs.
ERP, or ERP vs. PLM. The argument was made that PLM should drive
EVERYTHING, and I think for some that makes sense. I think that the rub
with WC, to Joel's point, is that this is the way for some companies, but
for some, especially smaller ones, this may not be the way that they want
to go, and I can definitely see where a smaller company could see WC as
way to much complication. So, while WC may be the Swiss army knife of
PLM's (or attempting to be), some users only want a pocket knife, and from
PTC, they don't have any options. That is a very valid argument as well.
