Windchill >> SAP

[MikeLockwood]

We have a relatively mature and state of the art Windchill system, but we are in the stone age on ERP. But - We're moving to SAP now.

The people responsible for the SAP project are very interested in PLM / SAP interegration and want to plan for it - and would like very much to talk with some people who have the integation in production use, especially if using OTB ESI with TIBCO, and executing transactions viaWindchill Change Management. Multiple Distribution Targets especially of interest. Some interest in pulling info into Windchill from SAP (e.g. current inventory) but not a lot yet.

Anyone willing?? I'll buy you a beer (or whatever).

thanks in advance

[avillanueva]

I cannot say I have it in use but we are a year into our SAP implementation here. ESI was one of my big pushes but it did not make it into the project, not for any technical or cost reasons. We opted for a half solution focusing on BOM transfer only, rest manual. I can provide some information on how that hand off occurs as well as my ROI calculations I used to justify ESI. SAP is a very manual, transaction based system. Its interface is unforgiving and should be put on OSHA's hit list for causes of repetitive strain injury. Anything you can automate to avoid that system would be advisable.

[Marco_Tosin]

Mike,

we are using ESI and Tibco in our production server from January 2011.

First of all I'll explain you why we did it.

You can go to WNC to SAP in two ways: using ESI/Tibco (drive by PTC) or with NetWeaver (drive by SAP).

We decided to use first solution, although we started using SAP before WNC (and consequently had already netweaver "in house") because we worked with PTC consultants to implement this project, so we had buy ESI and Tibco.

At the moment we send to SAP only WTPart (15 differents soft type and each ST has his corresponding model in SAP) and data goes only in one way (from WNC to SAP).

In this way, when we send a WTPart to SAP, Tibco call a custumized BAPI which create the corresponding SAP part compiling, automatically, a lot of production attributes.

Because we don't use MPMLink (this project is scheduled next year) also we don't use change management and the alignement from SAP to WNC is semi automatic (every night we extract from SAP a list of parts with a small set of attributes changed and then, with a customized java script, this parts is modified in WNC).

Next step, scheduled in October, is to use Tibco to send to SAP also WTDocs, which is a new functionality of WNC 10 and so we are at the end of the upgrade from 9.1 M050 to 10.1 M040 (go-live is fixed for 09/09).

Working on this we have discovered that Tibco has changed his WF to SAP.

With 9.1 you have two WF (create and modify), but in 10.1 now you have only one WF (create/modify).

It's a big difference because at the moment, working in one way, we CREATE only in SAP then the parts has his own life (apart what I had explain before) and SAP never send to WNC any data.

Now we have to be care not to send modified attributes from WNC to SAP (until we got MPM).

Beacuse technical work has been done by PTC consultants I can give you only general information.

Hope this will help you in some way.

And if I'm not to shameless instead of a beer I'll prefer, knowing your ability, if you could help me in this http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/fo/st/thread=35057

Marco