PTC Windchill is one of the more popular product lifecycle management (PLM) system for managing associative file based design data as well as related design and engineering information.
Because Windchill and other PLM systems are tightly integrated with design authoring systems, some times they impose constraints that make it hard to support collaborative and cross-functional processes related to manufacturing, supply chain, sales and customer service.
Problem Statement
The business problem that is evident is that organizations need to take the product information that is created by design engineers and transform it to create a cross-functional product information for manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, commerce, quality, compliance, and sourcing and release it to other groups within the organization and supply chain as well as populate ERP, Supply Chain Planning, Manufacturing Execution, Supply Chain Collaboration and Commerce systems. The same data is also used to coordinate other ad-hoc manufacturing, quality and supply chain processes. One of the core use cases of Z PLM is to serve as the process orchestration solution that acts as a bridge/glue between Design/Engineering systems and ERP, Supply Chain Planning, Manufacturing and Commerce systems.
Connecting PTC Windchill and SAP with Z PLM
Z PLM comes with out of the box integration to PTC Windchill and SAP and often for our customers acts as the bridge between design/engineering and manufacturing/quality/supply chain functions.
Z PLM uses data from PTC Windchill as the beginning point for initiating and coordinating cross-functional processes related to manufacturing planning and readiness, engineering change management and other related processes. Specifically process and product lifecycle management extension for PTC Windchill accomplishes the following:
- Uses the Windchill’s product related information to support cross-functional processes that support engineering release, manufacturing, supply chain and sales readiness
- Offers facilities for implementing workflow and related activities such as review, approvals, notifications and integration with external applications
- Provides ISO 9000/QS 9000/FDA GMP compliant visibility, traceability and reporting features
- Offers configurable process and applications for standards based design release, manufacturing and quality management processes (AQPQ, PPAP and other similar industry standards)
Business Benefits
Z PLMs’ product lifecycle process orchestration and related information management capabilities help organizations:
- Improve speed to market
- Simplify and improve visibility of product lifecycle processes
- Reduce time and cost of process coordination internally and in the Supply Chain
- Standards (ISO 9000/QS 9000/FDA GMP) compliant visibility, traceability and reporting
- Extend key product lifecycle processes and related information to the supply chain
- Improved ROI for existing ERP, MES,
Architecture
Z PLM is a multi-tiered J2EE compliant solution, which can be deployed on open source (Tomcat) and commercially available J2EE application servers and is 100% open source. It is readily available, designed for and deployable on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Azure.