discuss upgrade or migration challenges from Windchill 9.x to 10.x

[ddemay]

Hello,



I was recently asked by my supervisor at TRW Automotive to seek out other
teams at other companies implementing Windchill who have recently
successfully upgraded or migrated from a 9.x to a 10.x version. If you
have not completed the move to the new version, what is preventing you from
doing so?



Last year, we deployed out a Windchill 9.1 PDMLink only solution for
management only of CAD Models. There is no WTPart, no change management,
and no other documents (WTDocument) yet in the system. This is something we
wish to configure and deploy in 10.1 along with additional modules.



Our primary CAD platform with our 9.1 system at this time is CATIA V5, but
we will be using Mentor for ECAD, Nx, older ProE (maybe it has to be
converted to Creo). Anyway, if you are a site using CATIA V5 and are
currently upgrading, that is even better. However, I did explain to my
supervisor that it will be a huge challenge to find someone willing to take
their time to discuss their issues with us. So, obviously this is only a
plus, and we want to discuss upgrade/migration challenges with anyone who is
willing.



So far, I have upgraded from our 9.1 M050 environment to 10.1 F000
successfully twice. Now that M010 is released, I will test with this. We
only have about 50 top level assemblies, and with versions/iterations,
around 2500 "EPM Documents". Our data base, user base, is quite small. So
this is why I am urging my company is quickly upgrade before we include more
functionality for the end users to use.



What I should also explain is I am the only person at the company with
recent exposure to upgrading and migrating Windchill systems. I think my
supervisor would like to use the opportunity to network with others to more
quickly absorb and understand the typical challenges faced. She has
supervised a team who has used CoCreate WorkManager for the past 20 years
and Windchill is gradually becoming more familiar to her. I'm still working
on convincing her to budget for attending the annual PTCUser conference.



Our offices are located in Eastern U.S. time in Michigan. However, I think
we can try to meet at different hours if that helps make it easier to
arrange a discussion.



My supervisor, team, and I thank you in advance for your consideration and
time,



David DeMay

[AL_ANDERSON]

Solar Turbines went live from 9.1 to 10.0 for
PDMLink/PartsLink/ESI/MPMLink Engineering License on May 29, 2012. We
started the planning and staffing for this project in August 2011.

We did a lot of performance tuning, and we needed a lot of SPRs/Patches
from PTC to go live with M020 that we froze as our go-live build in
January this year. We use CREO Elements Pro 5 M120 in Windchill as well
as WTParts, all change objects, and lots of WTDocuments. We have 1000s of
users world wide.

Overall, users like 10.0 better than 9.1, but it took an enormous amount
of work to tune the system to be as fast or faster than 9.1. And at go
live, we had 2 weeks of server memory management problems causing back end
server crashes a few times a week, and separate problems causing front end
server out of memory auto-restarts. However, with PTC help, we have now
gone 8 straight days now without any unplanned outages or out of memory
problems. PTC Tech Support has done a great job helping us, but we wish
we didn't need quite so much help to get where we are now. M040 and later
M-builds are better than M020, but it is just too hard for us to switch
M-builds easily given how much regression testing we have to do.

For training, we only needed 1 hour of auditorium style "what's new"
training for users rather than extensive instructor led training that we
needed when moving from Foundation 8.0 to PDMLink 9.1 in March 2011. We
also updated 100s of slides of training material from 9.1 into 10.0 format
and have them available on-line to supplement the 1-hour training.

We would be happy to talk to you off line about our project, but our
experience might be different than what you are looking for since we had a
huge amount of data, a large user community, lots of workflows and custom
reports and services, and a big implementation team supplemented by 2 full
time PTC Consultants.

David, you can e-mail me directly with a list of questions you have about
our project, and I can either e-mail you directly a response, or we can
set up a call if you think that would be helpful.

Al Anderson








[solutions] - discuss upgrade or migration challenges from Windchill 9.x
to 10.x

David DeMay