CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
4 June 2007
Product News
PTC Releases Windchill® 9.0; Strengthens Six Critical Business Processes to Optimize Product Development
PTC announced Windchill® 9.0, the latest release of PTC's production-proven content and process management software. Offering extensive new capabilities, Windchill 9.0 strengthens key engineering, manufacturing, and publishing business processes and offers immediate solutions to product development initiatives such as lowering product costs, achieving greater design reuse and improving productivity.
As an integral component of the PTC® Product Development System (PDS), Windchill is a proven solution that provides collaboration, control and configuration of product content to over 3,000 global manufacturers. In an environment where products need to be configured to meet individual customer requirements in a shorter time period, Windchill enables companies to reuse designs, make modifications, manage work-in-process tasks, and synchronize activities among workgroups and the enterprise. Windchill 9.0 is focused on solving customer-specific problems that can deliver the biggest impact to the company's operations giving them the ability to manage real world business processes that affect time-to-market and cost pressures.
"PTC continues to deliver meaningful technology that directly improves customers' business processes," said Dominic Hand, manager, Windchill application development, climate control technologies, Ingersoll Rand. "Specifically, Windchill PDMLink® 9.0 offers new capabilities for developing product variants from generic products quickly and easily through a wizard-based user interface. Since so many of our products are engineered-to-order, this capability is essential for optimizing Ingersoll's variant design and generation processes."
With a host of improvements in enterprise product content management, Windchill 9.0 helps companies meet corporate business goals by streamlining the following key product development processes:
Manufacturing Process Management . With this release, PTC introduces Windchill MPMLinkT, which enables simultaneous development of product designs and manufacturing process plans to eliminate miscommunication issues and shorten development cycle time.
Change and Configuration Management . Windchill 9.0 introduces additional product configuration capabilities through a new configurable user interface that streamlines many daily tasks. Change Management capabilities have been increased to offer improved support for rapid changes, change modification tracking, and manufacturing variances.
Detailed Design . Pro/ENGINEER® data management productivity enhancements plus improved heterogeneous CAD data management capabilities accelerate the design cycle.
Variant Design and Generation . Windchill 9.0 helps engineering quickly define and validate product variations, so they can address customer-specific product requirements without increasing costs or lengthening delivery schedules.
Design Outsourcing . Effectively coordinate with designers and partners around the world by allowing secure access to product information, while controlling what they can see and do with it.
Technical Publications . Enable more effective collaboration on technical publications by managing Arbortext® content within Windchill ProjectLinkT.
"Continual customer demand for product innovation, higher quality and greater price concessions make for an increasingly complex manufacturing market," said James Heppelmann, executive vice president software products and chief product officer, PTC. "Windchill 9.0 gives manufacturers a complete solution that goes beyond departmental boundaries to allow sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing and partners to more effectively participate in product development and contribute towards realizing business goals."
Additional highlights of the Windchill 9.0 release include:
Includes new embedded visualization capabilities, delivered with ProductViewT Lite 9.0, which improve user productivity with dramatic performance improvements in loading, interacting and distributing visualization data
Enhanced reporting capabilities with industry-leading Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence that includes real-time, out-of-the box reports on change management activities, user task status and project progress
Powerful user interface configuration capabilities enables the efficient delivery of information by user role
Windchill 9.0 Availability
Windchill 9.0 is scheduled to be available in September 2007. The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC's discretion. For more information on Windchill 9.0, please visit the Windchill product pages on http://www.ptc.com/ .
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