PLM system

[bcg444]

Hello!
Does anybody has experience with PLM system for maintaining BOM's, ECN's, etc? We are a small company (so far) and looking for the appropriate PLM software to start with. The next step will be connection of this SW with our ERP system.
We were looking at Teamcenter Express (UGS) and Windchill (PTC) so far.
I'll appreciate any inputs about good and bad experience with any SW of this type integrated with SolidWorks.

Thanks a lot!

 

[pdybeck]

I have some experience with Arena (a little). Don't know if you are intersted in an "On Demand" product. It is quite affordable to get into and somewhat easy to set up. I don't think you would find that with some of the other solutions you are mentioning, but it all depends on what you need.

http://www.arenasolutions.com/

Pete

 

[Finethread]

You might find that Teamcenter and Windchill will be costly to implement. Make sure you understand exactly what the consultancy costs will be. Connections between various systems typically don't come cheap or easy.

Arna, Agile and Omnify are systems you might want to look at. I have personal experience with Omnify and would recommend it highly.

Good luck

 

[bcg444]

Thanks.
Yes, the cost of these two systems is fairly high. They definitely will do whatever we need, but frankly, I have an impression that it may be over-kill for us at this point.
This is where my question comes from. As I understand, Arena is integrated with PDMWorks that we don't use. I'll try to check Omnify

 

[kcarpenter]

Windchill will drain your small company of every penny. Companies much larger than ours have tried to implement it and given up because of the costs. I've not heard of Arena or Omnify, but have seen Agile. We have been using SmarTeam since '97 and it has been a good fit and stable. I would say it's cost is not near as much as WC, but along the lines of Agile and such. PDMWE is about as cheap as you can get I believe.

A document is a document and almost all PDM systems today can handle just about anything you want to put into them. Additional functionality is what you want to keep an eye on for later upgrades, i.e. workflow, ERP integration, etc. Don't bite off more than you can handle when implementing your PDM system. Get the core stuff installed and then phase in your other stuff (ERP, workflow, ECR/ECN, etc.).

It's a lot of work to find and implement a PDM system (although you should be thinking PLM system).

Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Administrator
Invacare Corp.

 

[looslib]

Windchill or TeamCenter with full consultancy implemetation and hardware will cost in the neihborhood of $750,000, give or take 20%. It will also take from 4-6 months to implement.

For a small shop, these systems are overkill.

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

Ben Loosli
Sr IS Technologist
L-3 Communications

 

[fcsuper]

Stay away from Agile as well.

If you are in a non-medical field, then look into solutions scaled to your size. If the company is going to grow, then look to setting up a system that can expand with that growth. Whatever you choose, try to find an Enterprize-wide solution that will handle revision control, change control, doc control, material control, inventory, work orders, etc.

Matt
CAD Engineer/ECN Analyst
Silicon Valley, CA

http://sw.fcsuper.com/index.php

 

[sldwkmin]

I'm not sure what level system you are looking for exactly. Everyone for the most part is referencing enterprise level systems. You may want to take a look at PDMWE as mentioned and I would also look at DBWorks. It has a lot of functionality, is easy to implement, contains workflow and other advanced functions as well. PDMWE and DBWorks have plenty of functionality for almost all cases.

Cole M
CSWP, CSWST, CSWI, CPDM
SW06
SW07
IBM T42p, 2g proc., 1g RAM,ATI Mobility Fire GL T2
HP XW4100, 3g proc., 3g RAM, Nvidia Quadro 980 XGL
HP XW4300, 3.4g proc, 2.5g RAM, ATI Fire GL 3100

 

[bcg444]

Thanks a lot for all the inputs!

 

[roguewrench]

We were recently were using Arena Solutions and decided to switch to a simpler solution.
We installed Microsoft SharePoint (has Rev and notification control), we maintain our ECN and BOM's there. This keeps it local (on the local network, which means you control it). We are able to have links to file archives.
We also installed PDMWorks Enterprise for the non CAD people.

CJ Goodrich
Product Design Engineer
Leatherman Tool Group
Portland, Oregon

 

[bcg444]

Once you decided to switch to another tool, have you had any issues with transfering your data from Arena, i.e. did the implementation go from scratch or was you able to use the existing (Arena's) DB?

Thanks

 

[ShaggyPE]

I would recommend that you shy away from Windchill if you intend to integrate solidworks into it. The company I work for implemented windchill a few years ago and as far as a plm goes, it is good... a bit hacky, but functional. The incorporation of solidworks has been a nightmare, anything but smooth which is what the PTC sales reps described. There are multiple operations that are not useable in windchill when dealing with SW files. Renaming a model for example. I can only assume that some of the tools that are not available in the PTC/Solidworks integration are available when Windchill is used in conjunction with Pro-E. For that reason I would look into something like Smarteam. Also, PTC is slow to upgrade their software to work with the newest versions of Solidworks. We don't anticipate being able to upgrade to SW2007 for another year. We just upgraded to 2006 a couple of months ago.

-Shaggy

 

[roguewrench]

We had to use Arnea's DB but we were able to add what they call attrabutes to the part level view. This was the main issue with us. You can only view these at the root level and we need to see some of this at BOM level.

Once in Arena you can output everything in csv or tab files. As far as your attached files you can d/l them or as we did keep our own copy on our network.

"bcg444 (Mechanical) 14 Mar 07 12:36
Once you decided to switch to another tool, have you had any issues with transfering your data from Arena, i.e. did the implementation go from scratch or was you able to use the existing (Arena's) DB?"

CJ Goodrich
Product Design Engineer
Leatherman Tool Group
Portland, Oregon