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ETRAGE Announces PTC Windchill-SharePoint Integration App

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ETRAGE, a systems integration and design process automation company, announced at PTC Live Global that it’s releasing Windchill EasySearch app for PTC Windchill PDMLink for CAD files and documents.

A little background on ETRAGE: The company has been building solutions for PTC customers that help automate viewable file creation and management, integrate PTC Windchill with ERP, MRP, CRM & SharePoint systems and clean and migrate data for PTC Windchill.

ETRAGE PTC Windchill EasySearch provides a fast and optimized way of delivering the desired design data to customers, suppliers, purchasers, speeding the information flow through engineering, manufacturing and service.
ETRAGE PTC Windchill EasySearch provides a fast and optimized way of delivering the desired design data to customers, suppliers, purchasers, speeding the information flow through engineering, manufacturing and service.

Windchill EasySearch application for PTC Windchill PDMLink for CAD files and documents

• Offers a customizable Windchill search mechanism providing various options by: name, number, context, and object type, from a text file list. These search fields can be easily enabled or disabled on the User Interface by a company administrator.

• Through search results, users can list the files, gain access to the representation files, secondary content files such as PDF, DXF, STEP or IGES, open files in Creo, open files in CreoView, download files to a Workspace and use other Windchill operations.

• Windchill EasySearch allows fast and simple access to representation files and secondary content files from a standard Windchill search result page or object list in the Windchill folder through the Action Menu or a right mouse button click.

ETRAGE SmartPDF

• Provides users with the ability to get the note text as an annotation each time a user hovers their mouse over the note symbol in the PDF.

• The solution also provides the functionality of selecting section view call-out symbols and automatically changes the view of the drawing to the sheet and location of the related section view.

• SmartPDF is an add-on to the ETRAGE Plot Service for PTC Windchill, which improves your viewing experience of the created PDF by adding Annotations and Zone References.

WXML Universal Integrator for PTC Windchill

• WXML automatically exports Bills-of-Material (BOM) metadata and viewable files from PTC Windchill PDMLink in structured XML and PDF format files to a Windows folder for transfer to the ERP application. The BOMs and PDFs are then read into ERP. WXML also automatically reads structured XML files from a Windows folder in which ERP provides requests for data extraction from Windchill. Besides BOM and PDFs, WXML also supports Change Requests transfers between Windchill and ERP.

• WXML is targeted at those companies that look for an easy to deploy, out-of-the-box solution to integrate Windchill with ERP. Typically, companies already have in house ERP IT resources to export and import data to and from the ERP application. ETRAGE provides an affordable option to companies to integrate their ERP systems with Windchill.

• ETRAGE’s Universal Windchill Integrator provides, real-time updates of BOMs and change requests into ERP, streamlines data flow between the engineering, manufacturing and purchasing departments, eliminates manual data entry or processes of large sets of data and insures that manufacturing and purchasing has access to the most up-to-date engineering data and drawings inside the ERP system.

ETRAGE Drawing Notes Search application for PTC Creo Parametric and PTC Windchill PDMLink

• The Drawing Notes Search application provides companies with a simple, yet powerful method for managing notes that are on PTC Creo drawings and stored in Windchill PDMLink.

• The Application provides an automatic method for capturing notes from Creo drawings and storing them in a database. Once in the database, notes content can be accessed with a Web-based interface by searching and selecting on a drawing name or number, note character string or drawing parameter or attribute. Notes can be sorted, filtered and reviewed. Drawings can be opened for editing from links in the application. Note lists can be exported to Excel or CSV formats.

For more information on ETAGE, click here.

Barb Schmitz

ETRAGE Demonstrates a Better Way to Share Files with SubContractors

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ETRAGE LLC, a systems integration software company, will be presenting a solution that will make it easier for companies to provide access to 2D and 3D design files for their subcontractors at this year’s PTC’s Live Global Conference in Boston, June 15-17.

The presentation will describe the process of how ETRAGE customer COM DEV Ltd. now provides immediate access for its sub-contractors to 2D PDF and 3D STEP and ACIS files of design drawings and models. Options investigated include an on-demand call to the COM DEV FTP site, a customized FTP portal and the final solution of using Windchill directly through the ETRAGE Plot Service for PTC Windchill-PSW.

ENTRGE will present how to provide immediate access for sub-contractors to 2D PDF and 3D STEP and ACIS files of design drawings and models at this year's PTC Live Global Conference.
ENTRGE will present how to provide immediate access to its sub-contractors to 2D PDF and 3D STEP and ACIS files of design drawings and models at this year’s PTC Live Global Conference.

Eugene Stewart, senior Windchill administrator at COM DEV, explains how the solution was implemented. “Now vendors and customers are allowed into the COM DEV Windchill system for direct access to our latest designs. The On-Demand operating mode of PSW allows them to pull the files in a number of common formats to suit their many needs. In addition, COM DEV realizes a 40-day annual savings of a designers’ time.”

Bojan Rapaic, founder and president of ETRAGE LLC comments, “COM DEV is one of many of our clients seeing this type of a return on investment. Teams are required to be much more efficient today and ‘teams’ extend to sub-contractors. We see significant benefit to providing subcontractors with direct access to approved files.”

In addition, ETRAGE will have demonstrations of the PTC Windchill – ERP integration solutions, SharePoint Integration product, ETRAGE Bulk Loader, ETRAGE Quality Server, ETRAGE Smart PDF, ETRAGE Drawing Notes Search, ETRAGE Model Clean-up Utilities and ETRAGE Viewer.

If you’re in Boston for the PTC event, be sure and stop by the ENTRAGE booth (#506) to get a hands-on demo and to discuss your company’s specific needs.

Barb Schmitz

How Whirlpool uses PTC CAD and PLM technology

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Whirlpool Corp's Maytag Maxima seriesHome appliances aren’t what they used to be. Consider, for example, washers and dryers. At this week’s PlanetPTC conference, Fred Bellio, CIO of Whirlpool’s Global Product Organization, and Jeff Burk, Director of Whirlpool’s Constellation Program Management Office, described some of the complexities of his company’s Maytag Maxima line of washers and dryers. Washers and dryers from 50 years ago (when my mother was doing the family’s laundry) were mostly mechanical, with an electric drive motor, a timer, and a few switches, solenoids and relays. The Maxima line are about one-third mechanical, one-third electrical/electronic, and one-third software.

Who would have guessed that a clothes washer could have a million lines of software source code, and use WI-fi for remote diagnostics (and even electrical load shedding?)

Whirlpool is the world’s #1 major appliance company, with $19 billion in revenue, and around 70,000 employees. Its products are developed globally, and sold in over 170 countries. While it may not face the same challenges as large automotive or aerospace companies, that doesn’t mean that it’s got things easy when it comes to product development.

Whirlpool’s PLM strategy

To continue to be competitive in the appliance business, Whirlpool needs to implement a top-notch product development process. The Whirlpool program chartered to deliver that process is code named Constellation.

Constellation’s goals are to:

  • Leverage Whirlpool’s global footprint and scale,
  • Enable end‐to‐end lean product development,
  • Enhance collaboration across functions, geographies, & supply chain, and,
  • Provide a real time single source of product information.

Whirlpool PLMThe Constellation program provides Whirlpool with a year-by road-map for implementing PLM technology. This year there are projects related to CAD, core PLM, design quality, cost management, product & portfolio management, service, strategic sourcing, and product quality. It’s not a trivial amount of work. (You can look at Whirpool’s PlanetPTC presentation on Constellation here.)

Ultimately, the benefits Whirlpool hopes to gain include:

  • Shorter product development cycles,
  • More consumer relevant innovation,
  • More product variants from fewer platforms, and,
  • Best cost and best quality position.

Whirlpool and PTC

Whirlpool has been a long-term PTC customer, first using Pro/E in 1986, and standardizing on it in 1990. The company entered into a strategic relationship with PTC in 2010, and currently uses a wide variety of PTC products, including ProE/Creo, Windchill ProjectLink, Windchill PDMLink, WQS, MathCAD, Integrity, PPMLink, Arbortext, Isodraw, and Product View.

My sense is that Whirlpool is a very good example of an ideal PTC customer. Their particular combination of needs are a great match for PTC’s technology. (That may be because PTC pays attention to their customers’ needs when planning their technologies.) Two PTC technologies of special note for Whirlpool are likely to be application lifecycle management (ALM), and service lifecycle management (SLM.)  I’ll be writing more about those two technologies in the near future.

While you could make an argument that Whirlpool could be as well-served by any number of other CAD programs (including SolidWorks, Inventor, and Solid Edge) as they are by ProE/Creo, I think there’s an equally strong (or  stronger) counter-argument. Creo 2.0 includes some capabilities of great value to a company such as Whirlpool. The thing that comes to my mind first is integrated parametric, direct, and organic subdivision surface shape modeling. But the hot ticket is the new Creo 2.0 Options Modeler, which, when coupled with Windchill, is the no-brainer choice for building multiple product variants on a single platform.

Even good examples have flaws

Listening to Jeff Burk describe Whirlpool’s Constellation strategy at the PlanetPTC conference, it occurred to me that the company does seem to have a solid grasp on where it’s going with PLM. I’d expect this: Bellio was the PLM Practice Director at Mercury Marine’s PLM Services group (a company that Siemens PLM highlighted at their recent customer conference.) He also worked in PLM strategy and deployment at Bombardier—and aerospace is where the rubber meets the road for PLM (to strain a metaphor.) Burk has 25 years at Whirlpool, and knows what makes the company tick.

Still, I was curious: Whirlpool has been using Pro/E for 26 years. Do they have the CAD portion of their PLM strategy down? I asked Bellio and Burk about three product design-centric best practices that are generally thought to make a big difference in time to market, cost, and quality: systems engineering, model-based development (e.g., no drawings), and up-front CAE.

Bellio and Burk agreed that each of these are of real value, and that Whirlpool is very interested in them. But, Whirlpool isn’t doing any of them yet.

Why? Start with model-based development: (MBD): It’s simply difficult to change from a drawing-centric to a model-centric culture. Even if good software tools for doing 3D GD&T are available (and they are available for ProE/Creo, both from PTC, and from third-parties such as Sigmetrix), engineers are comfortable with drawings, and aren’t inclined to change, if they can help it. The only industries in which there is widespread adoption of MBD are aerospace and, to a lesser degree, automotive. (This will change over time: MBD is a hot industry trend.)

Similarly, implementing systems engineering and up-front CAE require cultural and process changes that are not natural for CAD users (and particularly ProE users) who’ve invested a lot of time and effort in learning how to do it the way they’re doing it now. You can’t just “install” these practices in a product development process, and expect everyone to jump into using them.

This stuff takes time, and commitment

Looking at Whirlpool’s example, I wonder: do any of PTC’s customers take “full advantage” of all (or even most) of the technology that PTC has to offer? I suspect the answer is “no.”

As a start, PTC offers a lot of technology. A lot of it overlaps with technology offered by competitive companies—and many customers use a mix of tools from a number of suppliers.

Yet, beyond issues of scale, the process of implementing PLM in a company, whether small or large, takes time and commitment, no matter which technology suppliers you use.   There is no magic bullet that will make the process easy.  My sense is that the folks at PTC are focused on doing what they can to make the process easier.  While I still think PTC has a long way to go in making their technology more accessible for non-experts, I’ve seen enough progress that I’m encouraged.

PTC announces Creo 2.0, Windchill 10.1, and shake-and-break 1.0

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This week, PRC announced Creo 2.0 and Windchill 10.1. These aren’t big releases in the grand scheme of things, but they are important releases, and show that PTC is working hard to deliver on what it’s promised.

Creo 2.0

This release includes fresh and updated releases of the 9 existing Creo apps, and adds a 10th new app called Options Modeler, which supports design-to-order and assemble-to-order. Picture, if you will, the kind of capabilities that major PTC customers such as Caterpillar and Deere might need, and you’ll get an idea of what Options Modeler is about. It integrates with Windchill, and can handle arbitrarily large and complex assemblies. It’s available today an extension to Creo Parametric and will be available as a stand-alone app in June.

With the new release, PTC is offering the free Creo Sketch app for Apple devices, and Creo Layout for doing 2D layouts as a front-end to 3D design.

Overall, PTC has added more than 490 enhancements througought the Creo like. PTC says that the quality, performance and usability of version 2.0 of the entire Creo family is dramatically improved from version 1.0.

Windchill 10.1

PTC has integrated Integrity with Windchill, and are leveraging it for comprehensive requirements management. Integrity is the tool PTC customers will use to capture and, ultimately, trace customer requirements across the product development lifecycle to ensure the product delivered most perfectly matches the product desired. Of particular note: PTC is using Integrity to manage requirements in its own development processes.

PTC has enhanced Windchill in several key areas, adding capabilities to help users ensure compliance with government relations and with industry quality standards. One important enhancement is the ability to monitor for the use of “conflict minerals” in a given product. They’ve also improved how reliability analysis is communicated, to ensure faster resolution of issues stemming from customer complaints.

With the introduction of Windchill Mobile, PTC is now supporting the iPad and iPhone. The software includes the “shake and break” feature demonstrated at last year’s PlanetPTC Live, in which users can “explode” the diagram of a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail. I suggested an Etch-a-Sketch function, where turning it upside down and shaking it would erase your project files—but the PTC people told me that Microsoft already had a patent on that function, back from the days of Windows ME.

The official press releases follow:

 

 

PTC Advances MCAD Strategy with Release of Creo 2.0

Latest Release Introduces New App for Modular Product Design, Enhances Apps for Concept Design, and Improves User Productivity Across Creo Family

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced Creo® 2.0, the latest release of its revolutionary new generation of product design software.  Last June, PTC challenged the industry paradigm with the introduction of the first nine “apps” in its Creo family – conceived, in part, to enable a much wider range of roles to contribute to the design process with a set of integrated, purpose-built tools.  With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a new role-specific app supporting modular product design that extends how organizations can approach concept design, and delivers significant productivity enhancements to its existing Creo apps.

“The release of Creo 2.0 demonstrates PTC’s unwavering commitment to deliver against our Creo strategy and solve the chronic challenges customers face with traditional CAD tools,” said Michael Campbell, divisional general manager MCAD segment, PTC.  “Built on PTC’s heritage of innovation, Creo rethinks the very nature of product design, increasing collaboration and protecting data fidelity across any user role, any design mode, or any data source.  Today, PTC is also delivering the first technology component in its vision for managing modular product designs driven by the bill of materials.”

Modular Product Design

With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a 10th app to the Creo family – Creo Options Modeler™ – a new role-specific app built for designers who need to create or validate modular product designs in 3D early in a design cycle.  The new app, available this summer, delivers a dedicated, easy-to-use, powerful set of capabilities to build accurate, up-to-date, precise 3D-based product assemblies, irrespective of size or complexity. When used with Creo Parametric™, Creo Options Modeler enables teams to validate precise mass, center of gravity, and even check and resolve critical issues like interference for modular designs.

Creo Options Modeler contributes to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision, which promises to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures.  By combining Creo Options Modeler with PTC’s Windchill® product lifecycle management software, manufacturers can generate and validate precise 3D representations of product configurations defined by an individual bill of materials.

By enabling easier reuse of existing 3D models and through innovative interface tagging, the new app can reduce process errors and engineering rework.  As a member of the Creo product family, Creo Options Modeler also seamlessly leverages and shares data between other Creo apps, and with other people involved in the design process and beyond, further increasing detailed design and downstream process productivity.  

Rethinking Concept Design

Many companies prefer to start concept designs in 2D to quickly explore multiple options before moving to build more complex 3D models.  With Creo 2.0, PTC delivers on its vision for enabling companies to make the most of this early stage of their product development process.  The new releases of Creo Parametric, Creo Direct™, the free Creo Sketch™ (now available on Mac OS X with this release), and Creo Layout™ combine to greatly enhance collaboration, innovation and design exploration during concept design.  Since all Creo apps share a common data model, 2D geometry and design data can be easily shared by all users and apps and can be re-used later in the design process to accelerate the transition to the detailed design phase.

In Creo Layout 2.0, PTC is helping to solve the specific problem of transitioning from 2D to 3D, allowing users to easily create a layout of complex assemblies, quickly explore design alternatives, import a variety of 2D CAD file types, sketch and modify 2D geometry, organize information with groups, tags and structure as well as dimensions, notes and tables.  Once created, a 2D design in Creo Layout can serve as the basis for 3D models, allowing users to create assemblies in 2D or reference 2D geometry to create part features, and any changes made in 2D are reflected in 3D upon regeneration.

Productivity Enhancements

In the new release, PTC delivers more than 490 enhancements to the Creo app family, all designed to optimize the user experience and increase design productivity. 

Creo Parametric enables increased productivity and streamlining of the overall product design process with:

·        Freeform Surfaces – With the enhanced freestyle capabilities, designers can quickly and easily create more refined surfaces with higher levels of detail while still maintaining top level control over the general freeform shape. This significantly reduces the time to move concepts to precise, highly-detailed aesthetic product designs.

·        Cross-sections – Designers working in 3D cross-sections gain complete product insight with new, intuitive, and fast ways to create and dynamically re-position the sections, including instant access directly from the model tree.  Real-time interference detection within a section together with 2D visualization helps designers fully visualize the design, design changes, and detect and address potential issues early.  The new tools significantly enhance productivity when working in cross-sections and provide a rich design environment that accelerates the overall design process.

·       Measure – The new streamlined measure tool offers significant performance and usability improvements.  Designers can quickly gain detailed insight into key dimensions and measurements of any selected surface.  By controlling how and where measured results are displayed on-screen, and allowing for simple re-use of the displayed values into other applications, such as a Word document, designers can improve the efficiency and accuracy of leveraging precise measurements during the design process.

·        Track Changes – The new track changes capability in Creo Parametric allows designers to view, accept or reject model changes made by others using Creo Direct.  Designers can now work with a broader range of roles across the company while still maintaining full control of how changes are reflected in the parametric model.  This ensures design intent is fully maintained. Irrespective of modeling approach or Creo app, teams can now truly work together.

Overall, Creo Parametric delivers state-of-the-art user experience, new capabilities, automates common tasks, improves performance with streamlined workflows and enables dramatically improved overall design productivity.

Beyond Creo Parametric, PTC delivers significant enhancements to other Creo apps.  New capabilities in Creo Direct help accelerate bid-proposals and early concept design.  Casual users can now quickly and easily create new compelling 3D designs.  They also can easily modify models by reference to existing geometry of available parts and assemblies or quickly, but precisely place multiple parts and assemblies into position with the new intelligent snapping capabilities.

And as Creo Direct seamlessly works with Creo Parametric and other Creo apps, any 3D design can be shared by users across the enterprise design process.

In addition, this latest release greatly simplifies the installation process for Creo, only downloading and installing the Creo apps specific to a customer’s environment and license entitlement. This speeds download and significantly simplifies installation and configuration enabling teams to get up and running with Creo more quickly than ever before.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        Creo Product Page  (website)

·        Creo Options Modeler  (website)

·        Creo Parametric  (datasheet)

·        Creo Layout  (datasheet)

·        Creo 2.0 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

·        Creo 2.0 Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade (datasheet)

·        Introduction to Creo Layout  (video)

·        Images & Captions

·         Creo Ready Software and Hardware Partners

Availability

Creo Options Modeler is available for purchase today as an extension of Creo Parametric.  It is expected to be available as a stand-alone app in June 2012.  All other Creo 2.0 apps are available now.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service. PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks. Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide. More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC Extends Windchill Capabilities, Integrates with Integrity

Company Leverages Integrity for Comprehensive Requirements Management

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC® (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced the latest version of its Windchill® product lifecycle management (PLM) software, which is now also integrated with PTC’s recently acquired Integrity™ software system lifecycle management technology.  Windchill 10.1 introduces sweeping enhancements to the product’s capabilities in a wide range of areas, while integrating Windchill with Integrity raises the bar for how manufacturers gather and manage requirements and trace related changes.  In addition, Windchill Mobile™ is now available from the Apple iTunes store for the iPad and iPhone.

“At PTC, our goal is to help manufacturers find new ways to compete in their markets, and to make their success repeatable over time,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, PLM Segment, PTC.  “With this new version of Windchill, we’ve not only enhanced a number of critical functional areas, but we’ve also made major improvements to the user experience and serviceability of the product across-the-board.  We believe that PTC is continuing to set the pace for the value companies can generate when they deploy enterprise-class PLM technology.”

Do More: Comprehensive Requirements Management from Integrity

Less than a year after being acquired by PTC Integrity is dramatically expanding PTC’s footprint of capabilities.  Specifically, PTC has integrated Windchill and Integrity to combine the rich, collaborative requirements authoring and management capabilities of Integrity with the powerful “flow-down” traceability offered in Windchill.  This combination delivers powerful, comprehensive requirements management capabilities and enables manufacturers to improve product quality, reduce rework and improve time to market.

In addition, Windchill now integrates with the software change and configuration management capabilities of Integrity – and other leading tools – to manage defects and issues, as well as enable software releases to be synchronized with product configurations.

Requirements gathering and management is one of the most critical aspects of a product’s lifecycle.  According to industry analyst firm CIMdata, “Requirements management is all about balance—preventing one class of requirements from overriding another is critical. Effective requirements management ensures that the voice of the customer is captured and managed throughout the lifecycle of the product. This enables a company to design, build, and deliver products and services that meet or exceed their customers’ needs and expectations.”[1]

In addition, Windchill’s core configuration management capabilities have been further enhanced to provide advanced support for configurable products.  Together with new digital mock-up capabilities in Creo® 2.0, these enhancements in Windchill contribute to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision; promising to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures. 

PTC is also extending the breadth of product-related content that can be managed in Windchill for retail and consumer product companies.  With a new version of its FlexPLM technology, companies can now reference CAD models managed in a Windchill environment – giving retail product designers much greater visibility and understanding of how to work with products that have both hard and soft goods (e.g. a chair’s frame and fabric).

Know More: Track Compliance, Quality, Cost

In the critical area of compliance, PTC has extended Windchill’s capabilities for tracking and monitoring regulated materials use.  For example, the recent Conflict Minerals legislation passed by the US Government drove the introduction of new management and reporting capabilities to help manufacturers identify and assess the compliance status of products containing the regulated minerals of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold and their many derivatives. This allows companies to effectively protect their corporate brands, mitigate risk of non-compliance with government regulations and customer requirements, and avoid possible fines and penalties.

To further assist manufacturers with their quality initiatives, PTC has enhanced how Windchill analyzes the latest product structure information to provide early and accurate insight into product reliability.  For example, critical-to-quality characteristics identified in Creo are automatically communicated to Windchill Quality™ offerings for risk and reliability analysis, associating these characteristics with the test plans and manufacturing controls designed to ensure their quality.  A new Windchill Customer Experience Management™ module provides a highly-structured and automated process flow to trace and respond to customer complaints about product quality.  This enables a company to consistently resolve quality issues in a manner compliant with government regulations or quality management standards.

PTC has also enhanced how companies can accurately track product cost estimates and maintain related historical information by managing and displaying product cost information in multiple currencies.

Get More: Windchill Goes Mobile

With the new release, PTC is introducing a new Windchill Mobile app, giving users instant “anytime, anywhere” access to current product and process information.  Windchill Mobile includes an innovative “shake and break” capability that allows users to explode a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail.  This helps companies improve worker productivity, regardless of whether they’re on the road, the manufacturing floor, or visiting a customer.  Windchill Mobile is available today to download from the Apple iTunes store for both the iPad and iPhone.  Windchill also now supports Apple users even if they aren’t on a mobile device with support for Mac OS X.

PTC has also simplified the Windchill system administration tools to improve reliability and lower overhead associated with running a Windchill installation.  For example, the new PTC System Monitor continuously checks the Windchill production environment to give administrators greater visibility into system performance, allowing proactive detection of potential bottlenecks before they impact end users, and reducing time to repair.

Finally, Windchill continues to build on the dramatic improvements PTC introduced in its user experience, making great use of graphical information and further simplifying workflows to accelerate tasks.  For example, the new Relationship Explorer allows users to visually navigate between related parts, documents, CAD designs, requirements, and change objects.  This allows users to quickly navigate across product structures to find the information they need.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        What’s New in Windchill  (web site)

·        Windchill Interactive Experience(web site)

·        Windchill product page  (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Quality Lifecycle Management Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Analytics Resource Center (web site)

·        Windchill 10.1 Frequently Asked Questions ( FAQ)

·        Images & Captions

·        What’s new in Windchill 10.1 (video) 

·        Requirements Management (video)

·        Windchill Mobile (video)

Availability

The Windchill capabilities described above are available now, with the exception of integration with Integrity (available in early May 2012), FlexPLM (available in May 2012) and Windchill Quality offerings (available in July 2012).  The timing of any of these remaining product releases, and any features or functionality thereof, are subject to change at PTC’s discretion.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service.  PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks.  Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide.  More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC, Windchill, Windchill Quality, Windchill Mobile, Windchill Customer Experience Management, Creo, Creo Options Modeler, FlexPLM, and Integrity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

PTC shipping mobile apps with 10.1 release of Windchill

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It’s a foregone conclusion that mobile computing is changing the way people work. If CAD and PLM vendors want to be relevant in the future, they need to address the mobile market.

PTC has been working on mobile apps for some time now, and is set to deliver its first generation with the 10.1 release of Windchill, in March.

In a phone call today, David Blair, VP of Product Management for PTC, provided some background on PTC’s mobile plans.

The company is delivering first on the iOS platform (iPAD and iPhone), with Android to follow.

Initial use cases will include:

  • Search for products, part numbers, and documents
  • Viewing of metadata, including attributes and lifecycle state
  • 3D viewing of parts and assemblies
  • Viewing of workflow tasks

Here are a couple of screen shots, as a preview:

 

PTC Windchill Mobile screenshot

PTC Windchill Mobile screenshot

There is more to come. These are some of the apps in development at PTC, and headed for the market this spring:

Mobile PLM for the engineer: Being able to log a problem report on a mobile device from the factory floor or in the field. Having access to your access PLM information on iPhone and iPad, such as accessing and approving tasks assigned to you, searching your development database, viewing product info such as meta data, and visualizing objects through a 3D viewer.

Mobile PLM for the administrator: Being able to check the server, and quickly see how everything is running without having to go into the office to fix any issues. In addition, the administrator can provide support for advanced modules, such as project data, advanced reports, or manufacturing process plans – again, without having to be in the office.

Mobile PLM for the service technician: Being able to access, update and implement relevant technical service information from the field to keep crews working.

Mobile Social Product Development: Being able to access all of your social product development communities from your mobile phone. Watch the team feed, see what people are talking about, how they are solving issues while you are in the waiting room at your doctor’s office.

CAD creation mobile sketching tools: Upgrade from back of the napkin drawings. Draw directly on your iPad and have the data automatically be stored in the PDS – or shared your social community.

 

Aerospace and defense companies standardize data management system

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The companies opted for PTC’s Windchill software for their engineering product data management strategy. To build on its strong history of delivering a range of products and services for air, land, and naval forces, BAE Systems is moving away from a number of disparate, disconnected databases.

Windchill delivers a platform for access to product data and design to enable collaboration across sites and partners, support effective change and configuration management, and improve CAD data management in order to quickly respond to customer requirements.

PLM systems enable digital automation of product development and program management processes, as well as complete visibility and control over program information for secure, collaborative product development.

PTC

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PTC congratulates Penske Racing team for unprecedented weekend of race track wins

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PTC congratulated its customer and performance partner, Penske Racing, whose cars are designed and developed with the help of PTC’s design software, on its banner racing weekend. The Team Penske IZOD IndyCar Series team swept the podium on August 28 as its three drivers claimed 1st, 2nd and 3rd place at the Indy Grand Prix in Sonoma, California and 1st place at the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Irwin Tools Night Race in Bristol, Tennessee on August 27.  Often referred to as the “New York Yankees of motorsports,” these recent victories add to Penske Racing’s impressive record of over 330 race wins and 23 national championships.

The Penske Racing Team uses PTC’s design and development software in all aspects of race car design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing, which enables Penske Racing and the Penske Technology Group to develop everything from concept to manufacturing within one solution.  In addition, PTC design technology allows the team to design, prototype, and test in a virtual world which enables them to quickly produce parts in the constantly changing competitive racing environment.

 

PTC

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PTC lauds Xavier Falcons as winners of the 2010-2011 Real World Design Challenge

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The national competition for high school students is run by a public-private partnership with the goal of increasing the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. Students from 20 states competed in elimination presentations on April 16, 2011 at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center. The top three teams presented their solutions to a panel of judges representing government, academia, and industry.

 

 

PTC

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Real World Design Challenge

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PTC Releases Windchill 10.0

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PTC announced the release of Windchill 10.0, its product lifecycle management (PLM) software. With new capabilities that focus on product analytics and quality management, Windchill 10.0 allows you to define, manage, and validate complete bills of material (BOMs), providing linkages across domain-specific views of product structures throughout the entire lifecycle. The product is said to be easier to use and maintain. Users managing product structures in Windchill 10.0 can take advantage of embedded visualization.

Windchill centrally manages all product deliverables including MCAD, ECAD, documentation, and service information. The product unifies its ECAD data management capabilities to offer a common user experience, consistent with its existing approach for MCAD data management.

When combined with Creo for 3D illustrated and animated service instructions and parts lists, and Arbortext for technical communications creation and delivery, Windchill supports a complete service information solution. The software supports business process optimization, most notably for Detailed Design, Variant Design and Generation, and Verification and Validation.

With Windchill 10.0, PTC’s Relex and Insight product lines have been rebranded as part of the Windchill product family to better reflect their availability as both a stand-alone offering as well as part of a comprehensive Windchill solution. 

Windchill Quality Solutions (including the former Relex products) help improve next-generation products, prevent repeat errors, and build reliability and risk management into the product development lifecycle. New offerings include solutions for CAPA (Corrective Action Preventive Action) to accelerate problem resolution through improved monitoring and root cause identification. 

Windchill Product Analytics (formerly InSight) provides early knowledge of product performance and includes new solutions for cost visibility and carbon footprint analysis. These enhancements bolster an already rich solution for materials and substance management, which includes reporting against compliance specifications such as REACH and RoHS. These solutions help companies understand environmental impacts and address potential points of failure before they occur. 

PTC

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Aston Martin Racing selects Creo Elements/Pro and Windchill to design and manage development of next generation vehicles

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PTC announced that in an extensive benchmark process Aston Martin Racing selected and implemented Creo Elements/Pro for the 3D CAD design of its racing vehicles and Windchill for product lifecycle management (PLM) in its race car division.

Aston Martin is the only manufacturer that produces a car to compete in every category of the FIA GT Championship sports car racing series. Models range from modified standard vehicles in the GT4, GT3 and GT2 classes – including the high-performance V12 – to the 6.0 litre 600 BHP DBR9 in the GT1 class and the Le Mans prototype LMP1 Aston Martin.

Aston Martin Racing has moved away from its previous third-party chassis strategy to develop its next generation LMP1 from scratch. This new racing vehicle is now being designed and engineered from the ground up using Creo Elements/Pro and Windchill to manage the development process. In addition to the designers, the purchasing department uses Windchill for its request for quotation process, enabling collaboration with suppliers.

PTC                              

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