PDMLink 10: Best method to the madness?

[3dpower]

Hello I just recently joined a company who is trying to start using PDMLink 10 (windchill). We bought the starter package from PTC with some sample data (OOTB data). I was curious if anyone has any tips, best practices, or pitfalls they could share that would benefit our deployment. We will be getting help from a third party consultant and we have reviewed some documentation via PTC's support site, but I was hoping to get some insight from people who have actually done this implementation; mainly on topics such as object type manipulation, product and library structure use, workflow customization, etc...

Company background, currently we use ProE to design models/parts of drawings, ultimately modeling a power generation turbine. We use ePDM to check in and out files and progress them through organizational workflows. Some files (legacy data) are stored in network drives as well, which we hope to archive in pdmlink. We hope to adapt to the supplied OOTB Windchill Change management process to avoid any headaches.

Thanks in advance for any input you may post.

 

[robertib]

We have implemented Windchill here and one thing I can't stress enough is to test the system repeatedly before going live with it.

1. Look at the Windchill documentation to see how it works.
2. Look at your procedures and see how they correspond to the Windchill system.
3. Create an implementation without worrying about the change management - just simple check-in/check-out
4. Test repeatedly until happy with the basic design
5. Start testing the change management - see if you can adapt easily to it, or whether you need any customisation
6. Test until happy with the system
7. Get some other employees to test the system - they may see problems you can't
8. Create a blank installation and take 1 job through the complete process start to finish - at this point, keep a copy outside Windchill as well
9. When completely happy with the implementation, start using it

Please note that the above comes from our experience with Windchill 8.0 - if you do it the way I suggest, it may take months to set up correctly, but it will save years. We made the plan, and had to jump into using it quickly - it has taken us 3 years to sort out the mess, and eventually we had to scrap off our original installation (with some of the data unrecoverable) and re-install from scratch.

 

[3dpower]

Great info, I think getting use to the tool outside of change management is a very valuable idea. And you are right about taking your time and easing into windchill, we jumped right in as you said and now we have a lot of data (Orgs, document data, etc.) that we cannot delete, or have not figured out how :/ but anyway we will need to wipe out all of the test data and re-install as you did. Do you know if PTC provides any type of documentation or support on doing a re-install to OOTB state?

 

[looslib]

Go to Windchill 10.1 , not 10.0. More functionality in it.

A raw OOTB install leaves much work to do in setting up the Site, Organization, Libraries and Products. Work alongside the consultant and understand not only what he is doing, but how he did it. He won't be there in 6 months when something goes wrong and needs on emergency fix.

How many Products do you have? One product with various sub-components that are interchanged or multiple products that share sub-components. This will help define how you establish your filing in multiple Products or one product with folders for sub-component parts. Detrmine which files are Library files versus Product files.

Testing is important. The more you can do with an OOTB system, the easier it will be. It will also be easier when you go to upgrade to 10.2 and 11 in the future. You may have to rework some work procedures, but this is easier than customizing Windchill.

Run 2 systems at least. A development one and your production one. Test any changes on the devlopment system before implementing them on the production system. Use servers with enough power to meet the needs of your users. I inherited one 32-bit system that only had 4GB of memory and was set up with 3 method servers. We were constantly locking up and having to reboot the server twice a day. Method server memory allocation consums a lot of static resources. The memory allocation has to be enough to handle your largest assemblies. With a 64-bit OS, you have more available than you did with the 2GB limitation of a 32-bit OS.

I started with PDMLink 6.2.6 in 2004, went live with PDMLink 7 installed and setup by PTC GSO, switched jobs to another compnay running PDMLink 7 that they had self installed and now work for a third company that also did a self install of PDMLink 8 and upgrdaed to PDMLink 9 before I started. I have upgrade us to PDMLink 9.1 and am in the process of developing the procedure for upgrading to 10.0. Upgrading from a build of 10.0 to a newer build is easy now. It used to take hours when we would do PDMLink 7.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[3dpower]

We are in the infancy stage of implementation so your input is extremely valuable and greatly appreciated.

As for our product structure, ultimately we have one product which we model for. The Product has many parts/systems, these may be modified depending on the customer purchase (variances) or changed for improvements/updates/standards/etc. So I believe we will use one Product with a flat folder structure defined by the part/assembly name (PT-00001), this will be tough to navigate but we are hoping our users will utilize the powerful search tool in windchill. I hope to use libraries to store and maintain standardized parts such as Bolts, to be shared between systems within our Product.

We will stick to the OOTB structure as much as possible, from experience with Intergraph products I know upgrading and maintaining customized features will be a pain and a bad investment.

 

[3dpower]

Oh and we are running Windchill 10.1 M020 on a 64-bit Windows server with a Xeon X5675 and 20 GB RAM.