Windchill

Windchill is a product for product lifecycle management (PLM). The solution provides a possibility of data view about a product and processes of different enterprise information systems for all concerned parties. With Windchill of the company can improve quality of products, giving to the project teams an opportunity to work directly with the continuous operational data. Windchill allows the enterprises to lower load of IT departments and to cut down overheads, ensuring at the same time availability and safety when using both on-premise, and cloud servers.

Windchill is complex end-to-end the PLM solution. It integrates functionality of a core of PLM with the industrial innovation ThingWorx platform from PTC and the ThingWorx Navigate application. ThingWorx Navigate gives to the organizations an opportunity to considerably increase performance and convenience of joint work over projects, significantly having simplified data access, necessary for the specific user for accomplishment of production tasks. Using this solution it is possible to provide access to exact data on a product to those employees who have no sufficient experience with PLM systems. Use of the application does not require long training, difficult process of integration and setup.

2015: Windchill 11 for Internet of Things

On November 25, 2015 the PTC company submitted the software of PTC Windchill 11 for product lifecycle management.

The basic release of the Windchill 11 PLM system allows to integrate the digital world with physical.

PTC Windchill 11 works at a basis of PTC ThingWorx technology which integrates the data arriving from physical products, Internet resources and corporate information systems. It opens the accessibility to information, its analysis, effective use and ease of perception by means of the modern, clear interface.

Graphical representation functionality of Windchill 11 (2015)

Intellectual functions

PTC Windchill 11 provides idle time, secure access to all data on products. It allows the solution to control dynamic development processes of products. Additional opportunities:

• Role applications: a system provides an instant information access about products, extent of access to which depends on a position of the user and tasks which are carried out by it.
• Search mechanism: possibilities of fast filtering and search of specific information on products are supported.
• OSLC standards: a product - an open intellectual PLM-application. PTC provided support of the OSLC standards (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) to increase efficiency of joint work and to expand connectivities to other systems.

Interaction

Interaction between products and people who project them is developed, tested, made and serviced, in the solution PTC Windchill 11 reached essentially new level. The IoT-data arriving in real time from the working physical products allow to implement the closed lifecycle in the Windchill 11 system. Studying the acquired information about behavior of products in actual practice of operation, the staff of departments of planning, design and quality control of products can improve those functions which clients use most often. Besides, there is an opportunity to make the commercial offers expected different schemes of use and also to change construction of separate parts and the whole systems to increase product quality and to reduce costs, observing project requirements.

PTC Windchill 11: Smart Connected PLM (2015)

Completeness of information

Development of difficult products requires support of interaction of the specialists representing the different engineering directions. The changes made in one part need to be considered and integrated in other areas. For this purpose it is required to keep the detailed sheet where data on models of systems, different requirements, projects of a mechanical and electronic part, the software, documentation, planning and the analysis of figures of merit and information on production are brought. All these data should be available, to both the design, and production, and servicing organizations. The complemented functionality of PTC Windchill 11 expands abilities to manage with the description of products and allows the companies to be sheets during all lifecycle, at the level of separate parts. Constantly updated specifications of products will allow customers to make exact, reasoned decisions at any level of the company.

Flexibility

PTC offers different options of deployment: from cloud service according to the SaaS model to perpetual licenses and installation of the solution directly at the enterprise of the customer. Services in deployment are own division of PTC Global Services and also network of partners of the company. This flexibility allows to use the solution, both for large enterprises, and for representatives of small and medium business who need the software for product lifecycle management. The solution provides fast payback, small total cost of ownership and full compatibility with the general IT strategy of the company.

2012: Windchill 10.1

PTC released in April, 2012 the new version of Windchill 10.1 - the solution for management of engineering data and projects which included ample opportunities for team work, having put special emphasis on applications for collecting and requirements management and the analysis of compliance of a product to regulations and ecological requirements (including requirements of the state and industry standards). Mobile version of Windchill Mobile™ is already available to downloading on Apple iTunes free of charge.

2011: Windchill 10.0

PTC announced release of Windchill 10.0 in November, 2011, and announced it the most difficult release of the PLM platform which part not only the products InSight (product analytics) and Relex (quality management) were, but also purchased recently. The updated product received the optimized user interface for Windchill use simplification by wider user groups in the companies.

Windchill is the solution for management of engineering data and projects Business process optimization of the enterprise. Including the possibilities, best in the class, of the descending design and configuration management, the Windchill 10.0 PLM system allows to increase efficiency of almost all processes of the enterprise, especially processes of designing, variable design, check and a statement.

All product development process clearly. The Windchill 10.0 PLM system on a centralized basis manages all components of development process: different types of the systems of design (mechanical, systems for design of electronic components), design documentation, information on service.

Organization of aftersales service. Technical support, a possibility of carrying out warranty works and major repair, forecasting and production of spare parts should be planned parallel to development process of the product. The Windchill 10.0 PLM system allows to construct an information collection system for service of a product, including creation of the animated and illustrated instructions and directories of spare parts.

The Windchill 10.0 PLM system included new modules of the analysis and decision making, the analysis of quality and reliability of products. Windchill helps to solve such problems as high-quality production, achievement of the maximum employment duration of a product due to compliance to standards, observance of warranty obligations concerning operability of products. The modules Windchill allow to estimate performance and cost of ownership of future product for blueprint stage.

Thanks to Windchill 10.0 customers can receive big return from the investments into PLM. Beta testing showed that beginning users master and accept a system very quickly, and experienced users increase the performance. IT professional are expected by the facilitated transition to new versions, expanded administrative support, new instruments of monitoring that it guarantees reliability in operation and reduces total ownership cost.

Windchill 10.0 is:

• Significantly advanced user interface: more clear environment allows to carry out quicker tasks and to configure the interface taking into account specific needs.
• More effective management of complexity of products: abilities to manage are expanded structure of a product.
• New modules of assessment of performances of a product (the purchased products InSight): quality evaluation, costs and compliances of products to regulations and ecological requirements and also prevention of risk factors.
• Advanced administrative tools: the optimized IT administration tasks with a big set of means and smaller cost value of accomplishment of the Windchill installation.
• Compatibility with Creo 1.0

1996-1998: As everything began

In 1996 five PDM specialists from Metaphase company, formed Windchill Technology company. Having estimated that deep impact which Internet and Web technologies have on management systems for business information of a corporate class, founders of Windchill made the decision to direct the experience and creative potential to development of new approach to implementation of these systems. The purpose of creation of the company was formulated as follows: provide to end users, application developers and system integrators the software and instrumental platform based only on standard Web technologies for quick implementation highly - critical management systems for project information for a broad spectrum of manufacturing industries — from the automotive and aerospace industry to the telecommunication industry.

Initial investments in Windchill Technology were made by Computervision company which was going to use new technology in the next generation of the PDM systems. In January, 1998 it was a part of PTC to which passed Windchill Technology share block.

The three-component technology a product became result of work of Windchill Technology : Windchill integrating corporate program architecture, a development environment and reusable basic applications of management of corporate data. The Windchill technology is completely focused on Web and is based on its conventional components. And though in the market of PDM systems the majority of products have user interfaces based on HTML or Java now, the model offered Windchill is a step forward. In it all PDM-applications is written in the Java language, and as the middleware the known applications and constructions of Web are applied. So, for search of metadata instead of SQL the search system for Web is used, and communication with other applications, objects and repositories of Windchill is implemented using hyperlinks and URL. As a result users receive a flexible solution which can be implemented on the basis of existing network Internet/intranet/Extranet-инфраструктуры.

Solutions of Windchill company, using the infrastructures which are already working at the enterprise (networks, traditional and usual technology of work with Web browsers, the park of ADP equipment, etc.) apply debugged Internet-technologies. Within corporate installation of the current version of Windchill (fall 98 — Release 1.0.1) for problems of information storage uses DBMS Oracle 8.0.4; information modeller in Rational Rose style is applied to the description of model of information objects of any complexity; the Verity Search97 technology is applied to accomplishment of information retrieval functions on network structure on any characteristics of an information object. Oracle the JDBC driver is applied to a linking of Oracle and the distributed structure of the software of Windchill. Unification of interaction of applications in the environment of Windchill is performed using JAVA JDK 1.1.6 with JGL 3.1.0.

At such organization of the software the appearance of client applications of Windchill is identical for all popular platforms (Wintel, UNIX-STATIONS with OpenWindows/Motif/CDE, MAC and AMIGA). The user gets access to the Windchill application server using any Web browser installed in his workplace through automatically registered for it new URL Windchill-servers.

According to Windchill technology, in the distributed nodes it is possible to work with a complete or partial data model of Windchill or not to use it in general. It is especially important in the conditions of the modern enterprise where product development joins different applications of all participants of corporation — to create a consistent, operable and complete general data model in this situation is impracticable. Windchill does not require development of uniform representation of information resources — one of the most powerful obstacles in a way to deployment of a large-scale corporate system collapses. The Windchill technology allows to create the heterogeneous integrated environment meeting the unique requirements of the separate divisions and organizations which are a part of the company.

Architecture of Windchill

The Windchill technology includes three principal components:

• Windchill Foundation is corporate, Web-centric architecture;
  * Information Modeler is a development environment;
  * a series of the reused, basic applied modules implementing basic functions of a corporate PDM system.