Windchill to Teamcenter migration

Hi NB_9960264,

we participated in a project for a Windchill to Teamcenter migration a few years ago, and it was a really long and complex process... I don't remember exactly, but I think that it was an installation with 2.000 users, 40GB of Oracle database and 35TB of vaults data. It took 2 years or even more to perform the data migration, because it was very difficult to do it in just one "big bang", so we did it in different phases per Windchill contexts. There are many things to take care about:

• Objects metadata: there are many ways to export the information from Windchill about WTParts, WTDocuments, EMPDocuments, Change Objects and so on. You can develop custom extractors, export directly from the database with SQL or PL/SQL, Windchill Bulk Migrator.... depending on the used method, you will have to trnsform the information to be able to load into Teamcenter, and depending on the volume of data, it can be done directly with Excel like tools, or perhaps you will need and staging database and run different procedures to get the desired output for loading into Teamcenter. There was a tool named "IPS Upload" that can be used to load the information from csv files to Teamcenter, and I think that recently there is another tool "CSV2TCXML" for doing the same. The complexity could vary if you need to migrate all the history (iterations) or just the latest iterations
• CAD Data: here starts the fun... we were migrating CAD data from CADDS, ProE, CATIA and NX (and each one with several different versions). Each PLM vendor has a tighest integration with its own CAD, for example, Windchill with ProE/CREO and Teamcenter with NX. So it depends on the CAD information you have to migrate. It can be also loaded just like the metadata, but this way you are not ensuring the integrity of the information on the target system, because not all the relations are stored in Windchill's database depending the CAD tool, and because there could be missing components in assemblies:
  • NX: we were using tools such as ugclone and ugimport to load CAD into Teamcer and ensure that NX data was correctly loaded.
  • ProE and CATIA: there are tools also developed by the same vendors that develop the integration between those CAD tools and Teamcenter that can be used for loading the data

Anyway, you will need to extract the information from Windchill database and generate the loading files just like with metadata, but with different transformations rules. With a deep knowledge of Windchill database model, you can also get the files directly from vaults. In this case, the complexity will be far away from the metadata if you want to include non latest iterations in the migrations process...

• Additional information, like lifecycle history, workflow history, teams, roles... you will not have the same ojects in Teamcenter so it is not easy to get how to map this information between source and target systems.... For example,.in a many years running Windchill installation, there can be many iterations for a workflow. so even generating similar workflows in Teamcenter (Wndchill has many more capabilities related to workflows, so this will be a really complex task) is not likely to implement the old iterations.... if the information is required, then is probably better to import into Teamcenter as a text attachment, attached forms or anything else with the necessary information
• Additional modules: all the previous things are related to PDMLink... if you are using other Windchill modules like MPMLink, ProjectLink, SUMA.... there are more thing to talk about
• Data model mapping: you will need to take care about the data model. Things like types, attributes, bundles, enumerations, and so on, will need to be mapped between source and target. If the data models are different, you will need to think about what information needs to be migrated and how it needs to be transformed during the process

I am for sure forgetting many things but this could be a brief introduction about the main things to think about.

We didn't migrate all the information from Windchill (workflows, lifecycle histories.....) and the customer decided to maintain the Windchill installation in an isolated environment to be able to start it up and check any information if needed in the future.

I hope you find this useful.

Regards

Corporate politics and a direction change in philosophy.

We went from Unigraphics after 18 years to PTC products due to corporate pressure while other divisions of the corporation were allowed to stay on Unigraphics. 

One division had TeamCenter for their UG data and corporate said all data had to be in Windchill, so they used TeamCenter for their day-to-day work and then uploaded after release the final dataset to Windchill.