PTC Previews Windchill 9.0

The integration of the engineering and manufacturing worlds took another step forward as PTC took the wraps off a major new release of its Windchill product development platform at its PTC User World Event this week in Tampa.

Among the highlights of Windchill 9.0, to be released in September, is a built-in module for manufacturing process management (MPM). Called MPMLink, the module is a redeveloped version of the Polyplan manufacturing planning software PTC acquired in June 2005. PTC was supporting existing Polyplan users, but did not resell the software until the integration effort was complete, Tom Shoemaker, PTC’s vice president of solutions marketing told Design News in an interview.

Now as a fully integrated component of Windchill, companies can develop manufacturing process plans from the same product information created by engineers. By doing so, they can eliminate redundancies in maintaining two separate repositories of information helping to lower manufacturing costs, improve product data quality, reduce scrap and rework, and shorten development cycles, PTC officials said.

MPMLink lets users easily transform engineering bill of materials (eBOMs) into manufacturing bill of materials (mBOMs) and manage associative links. The module also shares a common change management process between design and manufacturing and delivers revision control, lifecycle management, and access control to manufacturing data configurations.

Windchill 9.0 delivers a variety of other feature in the area of change and configuration management, including a Wizard-based user interface to facilitate changes across all areas of the platform. The upgrade also delivers features to help manufacturers of engineered-to-order products quickly create and define new product variations so they can address customer-specific requirements without increasing cost or lengthening delivery schedules.

In other news, PTC also expanded its relationship with a href=http://www.adobe.com>Adobe Systems around digital rights management capabilities. PTC will integrate the Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES software with its Pro/Engineer 3D CAD tool, allowing organizations to apply persistent document security and management to their Pro/E models, specification sheets, and supporting design documents.