Windchill PDMLink Advice

[jdevitt]

Pardon any redundancy within this post to previous posts on this forum...

We are a fairly small business using Pro/E and Windchill PDMLink. Our use of PDMLink has been primarily to manage Pro/E data, the drawing promotion process, and the change management process. I am interested to hear how some of you large manufacturers are using wtParts and their structures in Windchill within the enterprise. We struggle to understand how the product structure management in PDMLink relates to the manufacturing product structure in our ERP system. It seems the major benefit is the ability to have a revision history on a product structure, but the down side seems to be duplication of effort keeping both BOMs accurate.

Questions:

Are those of you connecting ERP systems to PDMLink using the wtPart item connected directly to the Item Master?

Where do you initiate Item Creation? PDM or ERP?

Our new items exist in the 'design world' first, but part numbers are issued in ERP after release of the final design and production data in PDM is renamed to reflect the issued part number. Is this a common practice?

How do you keep your ERP BOMs and Item Masters synchronized with PDMLink? Our ERP data has planning and financial parameters and our BOMs have production work centers, materials, and time standards. Are you duplicating this in wtPart structures?

I welcome any responses from the users out there and thank you in advance!

Jon

[mdebower]

Jon,

We are in the same boat as you. Well maybe not the same boat, but an identical one...

We are a SMB and are struggling with the same issues. As CAD PLM admin, I hear questions about the usefulness of WTparts quite often, and other than being able to say that they will be useful SOMEDAY, I don't have a good answer.

Hopefully, we will get some good discussion going on this, I would love learn more.

- marc

Sent from my iPad

On Feb 11, 2011, at 1:26 PM, "Jon Devitt" <jdevitt@midwestindustries.com<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:jdevitt@midwestindustries.com">>">mailto:jdevitt@midwestindustries.com>> wrote:

Pardon any redundancy within this post to previous posts on this forum... We are a fairly small business using Pro/E and Windchill PDMLink. Our use of PDMLink has been primarily to manage Pro/E data, the drawing promotion process, and the change management process. I am interested to hear how some of you large manufacturers are using wtParts and their structures in Windchill within the enterprise. We struggle to understand how the product structure management in PDMLink relates to the manufacturing product structure in our ERP system. It seems the major benefit is the ability to have a revision history on a product structure, but the down side seems to be duplication of effort keeping both BOMs accurate. Questions: Are those of you connecting ERP systems to PDMLink using the wtPart item connected directly to the Item Master? Where do you initiate Item Creation? PDM or ERP? Our new items exist in the 'design world' first, but part numbers are issued in ERP after release of the final design and production data in PDM is renamed to reflect the issued part number. Is this a common practice? How do you keep your ERP BOMs and Item Masters synchronized with PDMLink? Our ERP data has planning and financial parameters and our BOMs have production work centers, materials, and time standards. Are you duplicating this in wtPart structures? I welcome any responses from the users out there and thank you in advance! Jon

[BenLoosli]

WTparts come in handy when you go beyond CAD vaulting.
You can do multiple BOM types with WTparts. We currently match the CAD BOM with the Windchill Engineering BOM. With WTparts, you can restructure the BOM into manufacturing BOMs. These are handy if you do pre-kitting of some of the assembly components.
You can also attach related non-CAD data to the WTpart, like an engineering report, manufacturing specs, etc.


Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.

[KevinAlexander]

By the way, for any of you looking to “sell” the usage of WTParts internally, these slides should help!

[jdevitt]

Ben and Marc,

Thanks for the replies. Ben you presentation is excellent and seems to put it all into perspective. Part of my challenge is that we only have two 'product structure guys' who manage the product structures in ERP, so I have to have some tangible advantages for them and the organization before I put any additional structure requirements out there. Ideally there would be a clear point of automation to push the mbom from Windchill directly into ERP with very little intervention. I assume most companies build this into a promotion process on the wtPart. Is this an expensive piece of automation? It seems essential...



Being a small business, we have been able to keep the engineering/manufacturing teams very integrated (they're the same people!). As we grow, it becomes more difficult to manage the disconnect between design and manufacturing BOMs.

One more question: in your experience, is work center information managed through Windchill's product structure, or is the information added later in ERP where it is required? If it is managed in Windchill, do most people make 'bogus' wtParts representing the work center data?


Thanks again,


Jon

[MikeLockwood]

Sounds like your Achilles heel (and a very tough thing to deal with) is "...but part numbers are issued in ERP after release of the final design and production data in PDM is renamed to reflect the issued part number." Not much that can be done efficiently with this major constraint.