Windchill 11 Bridges IoT With PTC’s PLM Roots

Fueled by set a strategic acquisitions, PTC has spent the last few years navigating toward a vision of smart, connected products. Sometimes it seems as if the company is emphasizing its ThingWorx Internet of Things (IoT) development and connectivity platform over its traditional CAD and product lifecycle management (PLM) offerings.

The newly announced Windchill 11 is designed to bridge PTC’s new terrain and its heritage, delivering a PLM system enabled by the ThingWorx technology to connect the digital world to the physical world for IoT-driven product design. Key to the enhancements, of which there are many, is the idea that the systems engineering design process becomes informed by real-world usage and quality data from smart connected products out in the field, creating a definitive source of product information that will enable richer collaboration and faster decision making, PTC officials said.

Enabled by a built-in ThingWorx adapter, Windchill 11 closes the loop with IoT data captured in real-time by physical products operating in the field. Image Courtesy of PTC

“Products that once operated in isolation are now part of a connected ecosystem with extended interdependencies,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, PLM at PTC, in a press release announcing the new system. “PTC Windchill 11 is the solution for companies that are looking for improved and closed-loop product lifecycle management to thrive in this new era.”

A ThingWorx adapter has been embedded in PDMLink, the data management piece of Windchill, and in the Windchill Quality Solution (formerly the Relex technology). This allows both systems to connect to another “thing,” which could be a piece of equipment in the field or another enterprise software platform, according to Kevin Wrenn, PTC’s general manager of PLM. With the ThingWorx acquisition, PTC also obtained key mashup capabilities that enable PTC and its customers to easily create integrations between systems and those capabilities are now part of Windchill 11.

In addition, Windchill 11 incorporates OSLC (Open Services for lifecycle Collaboration) standards, an open community approach to software integration, which enables it to communicate more easily with other systems, including PTC’s own Integrity application lifecycle management (ALM) system.

New search features help Windchill 11 users filter and find specific product information. Image Courtesy of PTC

Among the highlights of the new release are:

New search capabilities: Version 11 combines PartsLink classification search with traditional attribute searching to bolster users’ ability to find relevant product information. The new Web-style approach and familiar keyword search is designed to modernize the search experience for all types of users, Wrenn says.

Role-Based Apps: Replacing the role-based app approach in previous Windchill versions is release 11’s PTC Navigate, a way to make role- and task-specific PLM data available to all participants in the product lifecycle. The initial role-based apps include Navigate View, for visualizing product-related data. PTC plans to follow up with PTC Contribute, serving up seven tasks for markup and participation in the change management process, and PTC Author, a lightweight capability for collaboration and document management.

PTC Navigate delivers new role-based apps that provide access to relevant product-related data based on role. Image Courtesy of PTC

“We started to build a set of out-of-the-box role- and task-based apps to make Windchill more accessible to non-expert users of PLM, unleashing the asset that customers have been investing in the over years,” Wrenn explains.

Smart, Connected Support: With a feature called Performance Advisor, PTC is leveraging its IoT capabilities to make Windchill a smart, connected product on its own. This capability lets customers opt in to share live data with PTC, automatically alerting technical support to issues and providing PTC with insight on how to evolve the PLM offering.

BOM enhancements: A new streamlined user interface for MPMLink facilitates collaboration between manufacturing and engineering stakeholders while enabling associativity on part and occurrence level and conformity analysis between eBOM and mBOM. Other enhancements in this area advance product development from taking a drawing-centric view to a parts-centric approach.

Watch this video to get an overview of Windchill 11’s highlights.