PTC Strengthens Leading Product Development System With Release of Windchill 7.0
Industry's Most Comprehensive Capabilities And Strongest Architecture Eliminate Barriers To Distributed Product Development
NEEDHAM, Mass., Jan. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- PTC (NASDAQ:PMTC), The Product Development Company(TM), today announced the availability of Windchill(R) 7.0, a major release of its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology and a critical component of its complete Product Development System. The Windchill 7.0 suite addresses the challenges manufacturers face today when seeking more customer input while developing products across multiple sites and relying on suppliers for a significant portion of their design and manufacturing activities.
Given shorter product lifecycles, effective and regular collaboration with the extended global design chain has become more important than ever. However, prior to Windchill 7.0, manufacturers have been forced to choose between control-oriented product data management (PDM) offerings or more flexible collaboration tools. Attempting to use both together necessitated the development of complex and costly integrations that duplicate information in both independent environments.
With Windchill 7.0, PTC provides an integral PLM solution that seamlessly marries flexible and streamlined collaborative capabilities with formal control of information and processes. Both capabilities share a common pure Internet architecture to enable communication of information throughout the value chain, as well as a new turnkey enterprise interoperability module that connects to other enterprise systems such as SAP. Manufacturers benefit with faster time-to-market, higher quality, and lower costs.
"Windchill 7.0 is a breakthrough release for PTC and for the PLM industry as a whole," said Jim Heppelmann, Chief Product Officer and EVP, PTC. "With our Product Development System that blends Pro/ENGINEER(R) and Windchill, PTC is the only vendor to offer comprehensive create, collaborate, and control capabilities on an architecture that is integral, Internet, and interoperable. Windchill 7.0 is an important element of PTC's Product Development System strategy that helps remove complexity, cost, and risk from PLM initiatives."
Integral Collaboration and Control
Windchill 7.0 brings together typically disconnected collaboration and control capabilities (driven by Windchill ProjectLink(TM) and Windchill PDMLink(TM)) into a single system. For the first time, engineers can selectively and securely collaborate while maintaining the appropriate linkages to the formal PDM system. This is accomplished by enabling users to check-in/out or share select information from the PDM environment into secure, self-administered Web collaboration spaces where it is available to other participants using a Web browser. Everyday activities like communicating with external customers and suppliers, resolving complex engineering changes, and performing "what if?" analyses are greatly simplified and improved. A home page aggregates each participant's tasks, checked-out documents, and activities across projects and products. When used with PTC's Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire(R), Windchill 7.0 enables a truly seamless experience for engineers who want to collaborate but need to retain control over their designs across and beyond the enterprise.
"We applaud PTC's product direction for Windchill 7.0 to provide a seamless user and data environment across Windchill PDMLink and Windchill ProjectLink," said Dan Shoenhair, Director, Engineering Business Manager, Ping, a leading sports equipment manufacturer. "This will enable us to provide controlled access of product data to our suppliers; being able to collaborate with our suppliers securely is very important to our business."
Interoperability with Other Enterprise Systems
Windchill 7.0 also strengthens PTC's portfolio of interoperability capabilities with the release of Windchill Enterprise Systems Integration (Windchill ESI). This new module that provides turnkey process and data mappings between Windchill and other enterprise systems such as ERP, SCM, and CRM - the first adapter being SAP. Windchill ESI for SAP allows for the synchronization of information such as bills of material (BOM), released parts, documents, and engineering change notices (ECN) from Windchill to one or more ERP instances. PTC plans to offer additional turnkey integrations in the future for other ERP systems such as Oracle Manufacturing.
Pure Internet Architecture and Interactive 3D Visualization
With Windchill 7.0, PTC continues to demonstrate technology leadership in an Internet environment by creating a scalable J2EE standards-based and Web Services-enabled foundation which dovetails neatly into a company's existing Web infrastructure. Not only does Windchill help drive adoption by requiring nothing more than a simple Web browser, but Windchill 7.0 further accelerates the understanding of information with embedded interactive 3D thumbnails on product pages, allowing the user to spin, pan, and zoom in on the image to quickly preview digital product data. Because 2D information is increasingly being delivered via the Adobe PDF format, Windchill 7.0 enhances collaboration through tight integration with Adobe Acrobat. Microsoft documents can be automatically published to PDF format for viewing and markups are maintained as part of the product record. Both of these enhancements are powered by the embedded industry-leading Windchill ProductView visualization capabilities.
Additional Enhancements
Beyond these main themes, Windchill 7.0 includes a number of product- specific enhancements that improve usability and performance. Examples include enhanced distributed product administration, support for product teams and templates, extended support for structured documents, streamlined Microsoft(R) Office integration, and advanced audit reporting.
Windchill 7.0 became available to customers in December 2003 and can be licensed through PTC or certain of the company's authorized resellers. For more information on Windchill, please visit the Windchill product pages on PTC.com.
About PTC
PTC (NASDAQ:PMTC) develops, markets, and supports software solutions that help manufacturers win with superior products. PTC is the world's largest software company with a total commitment to product development. The company services more than 33,000 customers worldwide.
