CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
24 September 2007
Product News
SolidWorks Corporation Unveils PDMWorks Enterprise 2008
SolidWorks Corporation unveiled PDMWorks® Enterprise 2008, a new version of its product data management system with new features for managing bills of material, replication of data across sites, foreign language support, data connectivity, platform support, and overall performance.
"These important new features improve collaboration and workflow throughout the manufacturing enterprise, making everyone significantly more productive," said Jeff Barker, PDMWorks Enterprise project leader, Paper Converting Machine Co., Green Bay, Wisc. "For us, the bottom line is designing better products and getting them to market faster, and PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 is obviously engineered with the same priorities in mind."
Fully integrated with SolidWorks® 3D CAD software and reflecting numerous customer requests, the PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 product data management system helps large, geographically dispersed engineering organizations securely manage engineering information, leverage existing designs, connect global teams, streamline workflow, audit documents, and search intensively, all with SolidWorks' trademark ease of use.
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 enhancements include:
Better control and management of bills of material
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 has a wide range of new capabilities supporting the creation, editing, viewing, and management of bills of material (BOMs). These tools improve communication and collaboration within design engineering and beyond, including the manufacturing, quality assurance, and purchasing departments.
Organizations working on an assembly can now customize BOMs for each department, route them for approvals, and enable multiple reviewers to edit them without installing SolidWorks software. BOMs can now include units of measure for non-modeled items (e.g., glue) and can also display part thumbnails when a user hovers his or her mouse over an item listed in the BOM.
Improved replication across multiple sites
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 features faster, powerful replication of design files across distributed organizations. It optionally replicates only the latest version of design files for faster, less processing-intensive downloads. New capabilities enable design engineers to easily find the current version of any part or project, eliminating confusion and errors.
Foreign language support
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 nearly doubles support for native languages. The product now enables documents in multiple languages to reside on a single server, making it easy for international companies to connect their design engineers globally. Supported languages include English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Swedish, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Russian, Czech, and Brazilian Portuguese.
New data connectivity to external systems
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 provides out-of-the-box tools to simplify sharing of data with external systems, such as manufacturing resource planning (MRP) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, via industry-standard XML files. This data-sharing capability reduces time, errors, and expense of duplicative manual entry to help automate high-value workflows. For example, a design engineer can send an XML-formatted BOM material to an ERP system, initiating ordering, purchasing, approval, and manufacturing planning automatically upon drawing release. Likewise, PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 can import data through the same process, enabling engineers to manage costs at the design level by automatically calculating material costs as they work.
Performance improvement
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 has improved performance in deleting, accessing, moving, and rewriting files, as well as clearing caches. Search is faster due to new Microsoft Indexing Service support and richer now that searches from the SolidWorks software interface retrieve materials from the PDMWorks Enterprise vault.
"PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 is the ideal way for large, distributed engineering organizations to manage their product data for powerful, productive collaboration," said Jeff Ray, SolidWorks CEO. "The result is smoother coordination and better products arriving more quickly to market with new efficiencies at every step."
PDMWorks Enterprise customers include: FL Smidth, Munters, Mikuni, Spartan Motors, Tigercat, Automatic Systems, Ulma, Vestas, and Paper Converting Machine Company.
Availability and platforms
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 is available now for purchase in 14 languages worldwide through SolidWorks authorized resellers. PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 now runs on the Microsoft® Windows Vista® operating system in either 32- or 64-bit versions and continues to support Microsoft Windows XP®. Contact a SolidWorks authorized reseller for pricing. To locate one in your region, visit http://www.solidworks.com/locateVAR/ .
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