As one of the earliest proponents of product lifecycle management (PLM), PTC has long understood and valued the need to plan a product’s roadmap. This sets them apart from their competition as a CAD provider that grasps how important this functionality is to their clients. Their perspective has made PTC Windchill a leading PLM solution.

Any member of an engineering company can use PTC Windchill. Executives, managers, and engineers can use it to oversee the complex challenges and data loads these projects carry. Windchill enables companies to manage and control important product processes:
  • Engineering
  • Manufacturing
  • Quality
  • Service
  • Analytics
  • Legacy IP

This functionality allows PTC users to outpace their competitors.

The soon-to-be-released PTC Windchill 10.2 is a huge step forward in PLM capabilities. Its focus on regulatory compliance initiatives open two important new use cases:
  • Medical device manufacturers: preconfigured productivity tools that comply with the FDA’s new Unique Device Identification (UDI) requirements for product numbering, product version information, and product configuration data that take effect next year. PTC’s UDI capabilities include out-of-the-box review and approval workflows that automate submission processes. Its pre-submission data validation algorithms are virtually identical to the FDA’s, and it can collect and manage UDI data from multiple data stores as well as accommodate product versions and variants.
  • Conflict mineral compliance: PTC Windchill’s conflict minerals management system can now determine the presence of conflict minerals in products, perform “reasonable country of origin” inquiries and due diligence, report on conflict mineral compliance status, and integrate with critical product development processes.

While new features and use cases are important, user acceptance is the most essential element for a system’s success. PTC Windchill 10.2 encourages user acceptance with out-of-the-box templates for new CAD documents in Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks. Its document management capabilities have been expanded within the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office environments, and users can upload any CAD content in any condition to the server workspace.

Users can also visually interrogate data relationships and visually construct process plans. New system administration capabilities include:
  • Simplified and automated PTC Windchill support within a cluster environment.
  • Reduced time and administrative overhead when creating new test and development instances.

For more insight into PTC Windchill 10.2, watch their intro video.

To learn more about PTC Windchill’s medical device use cases, read their article on UDI requirements.