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PTC's New Windchill Bridges Design, Manufacturing

by Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor

Posted on Tuesday, June 05, 2007 5:35:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

PTC showed its hand in the move to better integrate the worlds of product development and manufacturing, previewing this week at its user conference in Tampa, FL, the new Windchill 9.0 platform, which features a built-in module for manufacturing process management (MPM).

The MPMLink module of Windchill 9.0, to be released in September, is a redeveloped version of the Polyplan manufacturing planning software that PTC acquired in June 2005. PTC has developed the technology since, but had not offered it for sale. By integrating the software as a fully integrated component of Windchill, PTC aims to let manufacturers develop manufacturing process plans from the same product information created by engineers. The goal of such integration, according to PTC officials, is to eliminate the redundancy of maintaining two separate repositories of information. That, in turn, should help lower manufacturing costs, improve product data quality, reduce scrap and rework, and shorten development cycles, PTC officials said.

PTC has spent the past two years working to make the Polyplan capabilities an integral piece of the Windchill platform, according to Tom Shoemaker, PTC's vice president of solutions marketing. Similar systems from other PLM providers, while they may offer digital manufacturing capabilities, are centered more on simulating how things move through the factory floor than on creating core manufacturing process plans, Shoemaker told Managing Automation.

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