about the use of windchill

[linda]

hi

our company is consider to buy windchill, but do not know it is suit to our products . our products all in families, so when i open a drawing of an instance, i have to checkout the generic and the instance 3d parts. so no body can do any works on this part, neither another instance of this part. right?

and our parts have reference in a context of assembly, gap is fix between parts, if you modify one part, the other part update automatically. so in this case,

the family can have 3 levels, it is possible for winchill to manage the family like that?

the windchill need a professional person to mantain it if we buy service from ptc? any programming background needed?

any comment about those would be appreciated.

thanks

[dhermosillo · Accepted solution]

Hi Linda

First let's talk about Windchill. There are two products that run on the Windchill platform Intralink and PDMLink. Intralink is used only for managing Pro/E data, PDMLink is an enterprise wide PLM tool, which also manages all kinds of CAD data.

With either one, you will need a professional to migrate your data and set up your processes. We spent ~$40k on migrating our information to Intralink 9.1, and now we're looking at another ~$50k to implement PDMLink. You don't need to hire a professional to maintain it, but you will need to train your IT group in how to maintain the servers, and you need to train at least one Pro/E admin on how to maintain the software side.

As for the issue of family tables, both Windchill products facilitate permissions and check-out/check-in of objects, but there's no way to break the associativity between the generic and the instances. In other words, if you modify the generic, all of the instances will have to be re-verified and checked back in, so at some point, someone will have to have them all checked out and noone else will be able to work on them. If you're running into problems with that, my suggestion is to break apart the family tables into more manageable groups, and eliminate the assembly associativity.

I'm not sure how your product is set up, so this may not be the best method for you. If you have a product that lends itself to being table driven and integrating lots of automation, I don't think any PDM system is going to help you facillitate concurrent engineering.

Hope that helps.

[HugoHermans]

Hi Domingo and Linda,

Regarding family tables, you only have to check out the instances that will change, together with the generic! This is a theme that has been discussed several times, I can be formal, the generic has always to be checked out, but instances not.

So, if you want to add an extra row in the table of the generic, only the generic has to be checked out, and after saving it, you will end up with a checked out generic and a new instance.

But, if you are going to add an extra column to the table, all the instances are affected, so all the instances will have get checked out!!

OK?

Regards, Hugo.

[linda]

it is very helpful.

another thing we are worry about is the version of pro-e wildfire. do we have to update our pro-e 2.0 to pro-5 to use the latest windchill10.

thanks

[dhermosillo]

At least Wildfire 3 is required to use Windchill 9.1, and at least Wildfire 4 is required to use Windchill 10.

Here's the compatibility chart (Wildfire versions are listed on page 5):

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/69784/en/WindchillFuturePlatformSupportSummary20110301.pdf

[HugoHermans]

Hi Linda,

It would surprise me that Windchill would not cover your needs to manage your CADdocuments in a collaborative environment. But Windchill is a rather expensive solution if you only use it for your CAD environment. I would advice to broaden the scope of your Windchill implementation outside of the CAD management.

Regards, Hugo.

[linda]

thanks for your suggestions.