Windchill 11 is coming

NxRev is just back from the Windchill 11 launch party and we’re really excited about all the improvements and changes this major release will bring our PLM customers.

The new release features all kinds of goodies:

  • new search capabilities
  • improved role-based UI
  • robust BoM management
  • new Creo management tools
  • cloud deployments
  • new licensing terms for greater flexibility and lower costs

However, we think the biggest advantages of the Windchill 11 release are summed up by its tagline, “Smart and Connected.”

Windchill 11 is smart

As Jim Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC, pointed out in his presentation, traditionally, there was a big blind spot in PLM data and use after a product left the factory. The goal of this Windchill update is to make Windchill PLM truly a product lifecycle tool as opposed to the product development tool that it has often effectively acted as in the past.

A primary driver of this metamorphosis will be the improved role-based UI. These role-based applications make Windchill much more accessible for occasional and part-time users by giving them an interface they can understand and only the information they need.

This will enable Windchill to act as the single source of product information all the way up and down the organization.

As an example, depending on who is looking at a given product, the default Build of Materials (BoM) view might show:

  • Engineering BoM for product designers
  • Manufacturing BoM for assembly and logistics
  • Service BoM for support teams

This will make Windchill 11 much easier to use. And new licensing terms means that you can have users such as “manufacturing floor” or “sales associates” rather than having to pay for every user as a named user.

The bottom line: You will be able to centralize more and more of your data in a single place and in a single tool, saving money and decreasing complexity.

Lifetime Products representatives spoke at the launch event about how Windchill 11 has replaced 23 separate data systems for their organization. Now they have all their information in Windchill and their ERP … and of course, that data is integrated. Which brings us to the next major theme of Windchill 11: connected.

Windchill 11 is connected

Windchill 11 brings in major additional connectivity. It’s easier than ever to hook up your other information systems and integrate your data into a cohesive view of your business.

What’s more, Windchill 11 will allow product data to come directly into Windchill from individual IP connected products—allowing for faster, better quality and product usage feedback loops.

Windchill 11 comes in whatever flavor you want

As previously discussed, Windchill now comes in a variety of flavors with subscription pricing, private cloud deployments, SaaS options and more. Improvements in licensing terms also make it easier and cheaper to push Windchill to your entire workforce.

With these changes, PTC has done a great job of making Windchill accessible to companies of every size.

Caveats

Windchill 11 is a significant new release with a variety of benefits for NxRev customers. But don’t rush to deploy it in production when it becomes generally available later in the month.

Like any dot-zero release, we encourage our customers to play with it in the lab to understand the feature set, benefits and potential gotchas (we’ll be doing the same). But we also urge customers to wait for a release or two for increased stability before deploying Windchill 11 in a production environment.

We’ll provide a full Windchill 11 review after we spend more time with the actual product.

Until then, call us at 408-986-0200 and we’ll be happy to answer your questions or send you a copy of Windchill 11 as soon as it’s available.

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