Let’s talk about Windchill System administration services and why they could be crucial to your business’s success.
When it comes to engineering centric products, technology can become a very complicated matter.
Due to the complexity of product data management systems, many things can go wrong if they’re not properly managed.
Here is a list of the common problems you could face if you choose to manage your engineering data management and PLM systems in-house.
1. System downtime
One of the worst problems you may face is extended sessions of Windchill downtime due to technology failures.
For example, it is common to be unaware when your Windchill system is running out of disk space. When this happens, a Windchill system can and will go down.
In many cases, these system instances are easily overlooked without the help of a dedicated Windchill support team.
The reality is, if at anytime your product data management system is not functioning, your company will end up losing money.
Aside from preventing your business from making profits, a Windchill system downtime could lead you to lose access to core systems.
This includes servers and back-end processors, ultimately, preventing you from doing your job. According to a study done by USA Today, 80 percent of managers reported product data management system downtime costs exceeding $50,000 per hour.
2. Windchill System Performance Problems
More than 70 percent of our customers do not perform routine Windchill maintenance.
Without utilizing a Windchill managed services team, you could be missing an opportunity to prevent, find and fix system problems prior to a technology failure.
How are you supposed to know if your PDM system needs more RAM, if you should allocate more resources, or if your Windchill server has been performing slow?
When you have regular performance check-ups, you will be able to improve the overall performance of your business.
Regular Windchill system performance check-ups also help avoid system downtime as you are provided with early warnings of any possible malfunctions that may occur. If a disaster strikes, you can rest easier knowing your business won’t lose any valuable data.
3. Productivity loss
Not only can technology failures prevent your business from making a profit, it can also cripple the productivity of your employees.
I mean nobody wants to hand out free money to those who are just sitting around simply because they are unable to do their job, am I right?
Many times, your IT department may have to work overtime to recover lost data. If the customer perception is affected, a costly marketing campaign may be the only thing to win back customers.
Bottomline, the impact of a Windchill system complication may be worse than you realize and your company could lose the ability for anyone to do work.
4. High-Security risks
Your Windchill system could appear to be running properly, but if it is not protected, your business could experience a security breach. If this happens, it will put your sensitive data at risk.
To help with this, it is important to have multiple layers of security measures in place. If your system is being closely monitored by an Windchill administration team, you will be aware of any inconsistencies.
When you have someone you trust monitoring your Windchill system, you’ll have less to worry about. I truly believe it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your company’s data.
By using a Windchill system administration service, you can rest easy knowing you are being taken care of. Plus- while your system is being properly maintained, you will be able to free up your IT department and focus on more important business initiatives.
Want to learn the current health of your Windchill System? With no obligations or any cost – sign up for a Windchill system check-up to have our experts look at your system!
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a more complex ideology than what meets the eye. Many companies assume that IT departments should be responsible for PLM although this should be reconsidered. For example, you wouldn’t have your engine rebuilt at a place that specializes in oil changes. This same logic applies to PLM systems for numerous reasons. Here are five reasons why IT departments shouldn’t internally manage your PLM systems.
1. PLM is not an IT specialty
“This is not something I learned in school.”
Just because your IT department is educated and certified does not guarantee they will follow the best system practices and the most cost-effective maintenance. After all, PLM systems are engineering-centric. They are complicated and unrelated to any marketable IT certification.
In order to support these systems, a great level of expertise, specialized knowledge and know-how is required. Ultimately, these systems are complicated because they require information outside of your technology department’s core focus.
2. IT Departments are unfamiliar with PLM
“I don’t know anything about it.”
Once again, let’s look at this in a completely different perspective. Imagine you are in critical condition and a specialized piece of equipment is needed for your survival. Would you let a nurse perform this task without proper training and experience?
Similarly, your IT department does not want to be held responsible for a system they know virtually nothing about. These enterprise systems are different in comparison to the products they are trained to maintain. In order to uphold a stable environment, many PLM systems require extensive knowledge and management. If your IT department is unfamiliar with your PLM, you could be jeopardizing the top and bottom line of your business.
3. IT departments are understaffed
“We are a small team with an entire company to support.”
According to a recent study, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported companies having an average of 4.2 individuals in every IT department. In larger companies, there is on average 11.9 IT staff supporting more than 500 employees. In smaller companies, less than 3 IT professionals are left to support around 250 employees.
Despite the increasing complexity of the IT business function, IT departments have remained small. Many of these departments are even lacking the resources needed to employ help desk technicians and system administrators. If this is the case, who is watching over your specialized PLM system?
4. IT departments don’t have enough time
“There is not enough time in the day.”
Fixing end-user issues and general day-to-day activities take up a considerable amount of time for any IT department. Their labor resources are only able to stretch so far.
Aside from keeping up with their extensive workload, many find it next to impossible to avoid larger projects from being delayed. Performing proper maintenance and implementing any new software is out of the question. This leaves the enterprise environment to suffer, and in most cases, fail.
5. IT departments are unable to give recommendations
“I’m not sure how to do proper system maintenance.”
Accurately running and managing PLM systems involves a high level of patchwork. When problems arise and improvements are needed, many IT professionals are unable to make recommendations due to their limited experience and expertise. Unlike trained professionals, your IT department has limited knowledge and understanding of the diverse environmental factors that should be utilized during implementation. When a system goes down an IT department is forced to relearn everything. This results in longer maintenance. Instead of knowing the ins and outs of PLM systems, an IT department struggles to properly fix the issue.
As you can see, managing a PLM system is no walk in the park. In order to have a high rate of success with these systems, one must have an active approach in place. Despite the persistent idea of reducing costs by internally managing systems, companies often find themselves wasting time and decreasing the chance of success. The reality is, it is just not that simple.
PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:
- Translation Management
- Part List Generation
- Publication Structures
My last blog focused on Publication Structures. You can read more about publication structures here: Revolutionizing Book Assembly with SIM. Next time I will discuss Translation Management. However, today I’m discussing Part List Generation, how to create value from part data.
The Engineering Bill of Material (BoM) is structured based on the design. The Service BoM is then derived from the Engineering BoM. With the part structure defined, you can visually identify parts and add them to various service kits and assemblies and ultimately generate a part list from the structure that can be used in technical publications. Updates from source parts and drawings to downstream processes are practically automatic. Building part lists with associative, up-to-date service information increases the accuracy of information and improves authoring efficiency thereby reducing time to market.
Each component in a drawing can be a part with its own lifecycle that is managed and repurposed in an integrated system. All too often we see disparate systems with Engineering drawings in one system and part data management in another.
Many users of Windchill use it as a CAD warehouse to store content more or less. Sure users of the design engineering tools find them extremely valuable, many folks are leveraging workflow processes and lifecycle features to expedite the day-to-day flow of information, and many have found that the change management tools add value when it comes to maintaining change integrity and traceability. Nonetheless, many organizations are not leveraging their parametric data for parts management (you know who you are).
The ability to repurpose Engineering design part structures to create Part Lists for Service information is the promise land. But the system can only repurpose parts if they exist as parts in the system. Generating part lists for catalogs and online delivery requires parts with end items and part structures. So in other words, using Windchill Service Parts and Service Information Manager requires part data management in Windchill PDMLink.
Service parts management provides an out-of-the-box method of generating Part Lists for the technical documentation community from a single source of information. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.
Learn More
Refer to PTC’s web site for a complete description of Service Information Manager.
EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.
One challenge when working with technical information is that publications can be very large. Several hundred pages is not unusual and in some cases over a thousand pages are necessary to describe complex service procedures and part catalogs.
Authoring and assembling large books can be a painful process as the sheer size can be taxing to software. XML, DITA, and managing content objects do ease the pain, it is what industrial strength publishing software is designed to do. However, there is only so much information the average workstation can process.
Many creative solutions have been implemented to meet unique business requirements for book assembly. The business requirements and data sources vary from company to company, such as selecting lessons individually to create a complete custom course; or selecting individual part list and image pairs to create a complete part catalog. As an application expert, I have personally coded many custom solutions to support cobbling books together over the years and I know that many other equally creative solutions exist.
PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:
- Translation Management
- Part List Generation
- Publication Structures
Publication Structures are the least sexy of the three and the one that truly revolutionizes the book assembly process. Publication Structures are used to assemble information objects that are to be published. Essentially each Publication Structure represents a book. You can add a table of contents, a parts list, or any other XML content object or images to the book right in the Windchill SIM web browser user interface.
Without Publication Structures, books are typically assembled manually in Arbortext Editor. Someone would still have to assemble the book manually in a Publication Structure, but the user experience is very different. To get a sense of this, in Arbortext Editor, if a writer wants to move a chapter to a different location, they would edit the document, select content, cut it, move to the new location, and then paste. In a Publication Structure, the user can drag and drop chapter or section objects in the structure without ever opening the book to edit it.
Publication Structures provide an out-of-the-box method of assembling publications for the technical documentation community without customizing. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.
Learn More
Refer to PTC’s web site for a complete description of Service Information Manager.
EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.
In last week’s post I walked through a manufacturing use case without Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). I hope you noticed the possible issues and costs related to restricting Manufacturing direct access to PLM and engineering data.
If you missed last weeks post, you can read it here:
Product Lifecycle Management in Manufacturing: Part 1
This week I will use the same use case story. The only difference will be manufacturing has access to PLM. I have also included manufacturing specific modules, which are run through PLM as well. Manufacturing has access to these modules and uses them for all Manufacturing planning.
As before, Engineering completes a new product design and starts a release process of the product in PLM. One major difference now, is Manufacturing personnel are included at appropriate points in the new release process. There is a full integration between PLM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as well. This integration allows for automatic transfer of the Manufacturing Bill of Materials (BoM) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) when appropriate based on processes managed in PLM.
One thing to note on the outline below; each system task, since it is in PLM, has links to all the required information engineering released as well as any supporting information. This is including manufacturing information, customer specification, and supplier specifications on purchased parts.
Part 1: Release Process
The lead Manufacturing Engineer receives a PLM task asking him to begin manufacturing planning for this associated new products design.
Part 2: Manufacturing Planning
The manufacturing engineer begins the layout of manufacturing processes in the PLM Manufacturing Planning System. This includes planning at each work cell. Each cell is linked to required resources, parts, CAD data, and manufacturing documents required to complete that cell action. With the correct system, this will have included all metrics required to properly and completely plan a manufacturing process.
If required, a Manufacturing BoM is based off of, and linked to, the Design BoM. This allows the Manufacturing Engineer to restructure the BoM as needed to allow for the most efficient manufacturing processes without losing ties to the design BoM and parts the manufacturing BoM was created from.
Once complete, work instructions can be created in web form or be printed to paper from this plan. The work instructions would include links to the correct Engineering data and required manufacturing documentation.
Part 3: Release Process Continues
Once the Manufacturing Engineer completes their planning tasks, all required parts and Manufacturing BoMs, are automatically added and/or updated into the ERP system via an integration to PLM.
During this same process, PLM system tasks are sent to purchasing to start the procurement process.
Tasks are also sent to the tooling designers to start tooling generation.
As mentioned, these tasks are automatically linked to all the required engineering and manufacturing information to appropriately complete each task.
Part 4: Tooling and Controls Tasks
Tooling designers access PLM to generate their tooling data and controlling programs directly from engineering 3D data.
The resulting CAD and other tooling data are also saved to the PLM system. This data is linked to Engineering data, Manufacturing data, and the Manufacturing process plan.
Machining paths and other controlling programs generated are also created and saved to PLM with the same functionality mentioned above.
Having these links from manufacturing to engineering data allows for full impact analyses of any potential changes being planned for the product by the company. As well as insures all downstream data is updated appropriately when an engineering change does occur.
Part 5: In-Process Change by Engineering
While ramp up is happening, Engineering makes a last-minute change. Once the change is complete in Engineering, they start a change process that includes all downstream departments. Each department receives a PLM system task with the all required information related to the change linked to the task. This includes purchasing, manufacturing, tooling, etc. Each department acts upon the change, completing all internal department actions required.
Once all of the departments have completed their tasks in PLM, the change has been completed. Manufacturing ramp up continues leading into the initial manufacturing process.
Part 6: Issue Tracking and Correction During Manufacturing
During the initial manufacturing process, a manufacturing team member notices there is a clearance issue with the design. The team member verbally notifies their cell leader of this issue. The cell leader creates a change request in the PLM System. During that process, he creates a digital markup that is saved with the change request. The change request is created referencing the engineering data the issue is related to.
The engineer responsible receives a PLM system task notifying of this problem. The engineer takes the needed corrective actions and updates the CAD data. This CAD data is then revised released and included in the problem report.
The cell leader receives the notification the problem report was approved and corrected. The updated CAD data is included, the cell leader and the manufacturing floor team member can now reference the new data directly from PLM and make the needed correction.
This happens many times during the initial manufacturing process. The necessary PLM processes are initiated based on the issues found during the initial manufacturing run.
Manufacturing uses PLM to gain access to engineering data because it always references the latest released information. This insures nothing is made from outdated information.
Part 7: Final Product Release
The final product is released to the customer.
All as-built information has been saved in PLM, meaning most of the related engineering data has been changed via the PLM process capturing changes. Anything that hasn’t been corrected yet is also saved via electronic markups to be processed later.
Part 8: Another Manufacturing Run
One year later, the company needs to do a manufacturing run on this same product. However, they have a large turnover with their manufacturing employees. Only a few people are there that worked on the first production run of this product. Without the use of PLM, this could be a disaster. However, all as-built changes where captured in PLM for the first production run of this product and manufacturing is still using PLM to access all build information. This allows manufacturing the ability to properly prepare for the next run. This resulted in very few, if any, issues during the next production run.
Hopefully it is easy to see the benefits of giving manufacturing direct access to PLM, even based on this limited use case example.
There are many benefits to utilizing PLM in manufacturing. Much more than is appropriate to list in a blog. If you’d like to take a deeper dive, please contact one of our experts here at EAC. We would love to talk you through all the benefits PLM utilized in manufacturing could offer you.
In the meantime, reading our eBook, “Designing an Effective Change Control Process” may be helpful. We walk you through how to design a change control process to improve productivity and reduce quality issues.
Many still think that a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system is only for the Engineering department. At one point that may have been true. However, I am starting to see a shift in that mind set. More companies every day are starting to see the benefit, and even the necessity, in giving manufacturing direct access to the appropriate engineering data through a robust PLM system.
In this two part series I am going to outline a fictional use case both with and without PLM. My intent is for this to highlight the benefit of PLM in manufacturing. Please realize the use cases are not all inclusive. There are many possible actions that need to be taken to start manufacturing of a new product. I am simplifying for purpose of maintaining a storyline that is easier to follow along.
In the first use case, engineering is working in a PLM system and Manufacturing is not. Engineering uses PLM for data management, process management, and controls their release process utilizing this system. However, only engineering has access to this PLM system.
When a new product is released to manufacturing, only the drawings associated to this product are printed on paper and put in a folder and then physically handed to manufacturing. Once manufacturing has this folder, they begin the required tasks to begin production of this product. I will outline below what a possible workflow might look like in manufacturing without a PLM system.
Part 1: Initial Manufacturing Product Release Tasks
The required parts are manually entered into the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. In many cases, the parts are entered into a manufacturing Excel file instead. Requests made to purchasing to procure parts and raw materials required, utilizing copies of the 2D prints to send to the suppliers. After that, a Bill of Materials (BoM) structure for the parts is manually created to support the required manufacturing processes.
Part 2: Process Planning
Manufacturing will then begin the layout of processes required to manufacture the product. In many cases, the layouts are also created in Excel.
Part 3: Tooling and Controls Design
The tooling designers recreate the required 3D models from the 2D prints. The designs are typically saved in an uncontrolled manner such as on a local drive on a user desktop. The machining paths and other controlling programs are generated from these uncontrolled tooling files as well.
Part 4: In Process Engineering Change
While the ramp up is happening, engineering has the ability to make last-minute changes. If a change is made, a new 2D print must be created and supplied to manufacturing. Manufacturing must attempt to replace all copies of the printed design with a new copy. When this happens, there is great risk associated with having two of these copies floating around. Designers are manually notified to make the required changes, as are the supplies to make the required changes to the new prints. Manufacturing planning must adjust processes based on these changes as well.
Part 5: Finish Ramp Up
Manufacturing ramp up continues leading into the initial manufacturing process.
Part 6: Begin Initial Manufacturing Run
During the initial manufacturing process, a manufacturing team member notices there is a clearance issue with the design. The manufacturing team member verbally notifies their cell leader of this issue. The cell leader will then make a phone call to the engineer whose name is on the print and explains the problem. The engineer tells him to grind down the part to allow the needed clearance. The cell lead marks by hand on the print how much the part must be grinded down. If the engineer remembers, he will also update the 3D design to match this. It’s unlikely they would request a formal change to be release. One thing to note here is that there is no history of this interaction anywhere but on the market up print on the manufacturing floor.
This happens many times during the initial manufacturing process. Typically, only major issues are formally documented which will drive a full change process in Engineering.
Part 7: Out-of-date Information on Manufacturing Floor
One sub-assembly was made using out-of-date information due to outdated prints being used. Rebuild of this sub-assembly was required.
Part 8: Product Release
The final product is released to the customer.
Most of the as-built documentation is saved on paper in a folder in the manufacturing offices.
One year later, they need to do a manufacturing run on this same product. However, they have a large turnover with their manufacturing employees. Only a few people are there that worked on the first production run of this product. They were not aware of the as-built mark-ups manufacturing had in their folders. So, many of the same issues were found and had to be corrected in this manufacturing run again.
I listed a few possible issues that could come from uncontrolled information used in manufacturing. I am sure you can imagine, or even experienced other possible issues.
Keep your eyes peeled for next weeks post where I review the same manufacturing process, but this time with manufacturing having direct access to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). If you would like to learn more about the benefits of PLM in manufacturing you can download our eBook, “Designing an Effective Change Control Process” here. This eBook discusses how following a change control process would likely improve productivity and reduce quality issues. The benefits of having a controlled process in place substantially outweigh the initial time and resources to get started.
