Caterpillar (CAT) is a large user of Pro/E. Quite a while ago, CAT chose
Teamcenter to manage their Pro-E CAD data instead of Windchill after my
company, Solar Turbines Incorporated, a CAT subsidiary, invested heavily
in Windchill as our data management solution. CAT has had a lot of
challenges with Teamcenter, but probably not significantly more in the
grand scheme of things than we have had over the years with Windchill.
However, it is interesting to note that CAT has a business unit that does
technical publications where they use Windchill to manage ArborText data.
The result is that parts of CAT have to export Teamcenter ProE data in
order to import it into Windchill where they can use it with their
ArborText publications. The CAT leader for the ArborText effort was
actually a keynote speaker at one of the PTC User conferences.
I don't have any more details than that, but I bet there are some CAT
Pro/E people on this distribution, and hopefully one of them can speak to
their experience with Teamcenter and Pro/E.
For us, we find Windchill good enough that the huge expense of changing to
Teamcenter makes no sense. We are heavily invested in PartsLink for
classification and auto-naming, Pro-E CAD data management with
visualization, PDMLink for the full suite of change management and
document management processes, SUMA for managing vendor part data,
ProjectLink for securely sharing drawings and other files with our
customers, ESI to pass manufacturing BOM data to our ERP system, and we
are even investing heavily in Options and Variants as well as MPMLink to
blend our WTPart BOMs with Pro-E CAD BOMs for sales order configuration
management. From an end user perspective, Windchill is not really popular
so much as it is either tolerated as either "pretty good" or "good
enough," or disliked in some areas because of the perception that it is
"slow." Our slowness is generally related to our very large BOMs (30K+
part numbers in a fully exploded BOM), very large CAD drawings and
assemblies, the fact that we still have a lot of IE8 users, and the fact
that we are not able to use a browser like Firefox that does much better
with Windchill data than IE8 or IE9. In 10.0, we have also had some
infrequent, but troublesome server stability challenges (i.e.
occasionally, one method server in our 10.0 cluster fails for one reason
or another). We hope that 10.1, which goes live on April 15 this year,
will do better with overall system stability than 10.0.
Al Anderson
Solar Turbines Incorporated
