PTC : Windchill Enhancements Deliver an Increasingly Robust Product Lifecycle Management Platform

For years, you've been using PTC Integrity™ products to break down silos among engineering disciplines, leading to more advanced and innovative product development.

In today's world, the demand for smarter, more connected products is paramount, driving business analysts, architects, engineers, developers, quality managers, testers, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders to use Integrity as the means for collaboration and control over the end-to-end product development cycle.

To that end, PTC is excited to announce the enhancement of our Windchill product lifecycle management (PLM) platform with the powerful capabilities inherent in our Integrity products: built-in linking and tracing between product data management and systems engineering, requirements management, source code management, and testing.

I recently sat down with Roque Martin, Senior Vice President & General Manager of PTC's Systems & Software Business Unit, to find out more about the integration of Integrity and Windchill and the ways the new Windchill offering is helping enterprises drive engineering digital transformation.

What does it mean for Integrity products to be branded under the Windchill name?

PTC has been delivering integrations between Windchill and Integrity because the market demands a seamless and integrated experience throughout the engineering lifecycle. In fact, the market frequently considers the combination of these two sets of products as a comprehensive end-to-end digital engineering solution today.

Combining the two product sets under one brand allows PTC to present a more robust PLM suite to the market. The enhancements further present Windchill as the solution of choice for customers and users who are looking for a consolidated, up-to-date, digital way to manage the lifecycle of their products and services.

How will the Windchill product offering change with the addition of Integrity?

PTC's customers use Windchill for product lifecycle management - but the feedback we have been hearing is that they are looking for a holistic PLM suite. In other words, our customers think of PLM as a broad solution that encompasses many different products and solutions, beyond CAD and BOM.

The smart, connected products customers are building today are much more complex than in years past, necessitating a comprehensive view of PLM that enables designers to identify dependencies, view design progress, and understand improvements and exceptions at each step of the engineering journey.

PTC is uniquely positioned to provide this extended PLM solution as it is the only leading PLM vendor with all these lifecycle collaboration products under one roof.

How does the enhanced Windchill offering help drive the digital engineering transformation journey?

When enterprises harness the power of data, they begin to see more of what's possible. Connecting physical products to their digital copy opens up a world of possibility that is changing the world of engineering.

For engineering, this 'digital transformation' - the convergence of the physical and digital worlds - drives value by linking an organization's products, processes, and people.

PTC's enhanced Windchill offering drives digital engineering transformation at all three levels: products, people, and processes. This new, integrated approach helps realize several PLM benefits, including:

• Extending digital twin detailed designs with requirements documentation, product functional and logical architecture (MBSE) and validation

• Leveraging the digital thread to enable the enterprise to receive and reuse data insights for improved engineering decisions

• Facilitating product innovation for increased value and engineering excellent for time to market and cost effectiveness

The end result is an integrated engineering lifecycle that gathers data from smart, connected products, transforming how companies design, manufacture, operate, and service products.

Final Thoughts

The enhanced Windchill platform is expected to be available this summer, while the Integrity Lifecycle Manager (Windchill RV&S) and Integrity Modeler (Windchill Modeler) products will be rebranded later this year.

About the Author

Stacy Thompson Stacy Thompson serves as Senior Manager of Corporate Content Marketing at PTC. She has more than a decade of experience in content, SEO, and social media development, B2B and B2C communications, demand generation campaigns, and analytics/content measurement. She is also a Professor of Content Strategy in Kent State University's User Experience Design Master's program.