IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is an end-to-end engineering solution used to manage system requirements to design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of ALM tools for better complex-systems development.
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PTC Windchill
Score 7.0 out of 10
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PTC offers Windchill, the company's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that includes BOM (a digital bill of materials) for cost and product quality control via parts-centric source of truth, dynamic and updated product change and configuration management to ensure up-to-date product information, industry standards and requirements validation and control, and role-based data access among other features.
The software is robust enough to handle highly complex software development or other product development and can be used well beyond the range to do what a client needs. However, because of the inability to hold its users to proper best practices, things can get wildly out of hand and cascade over the years, creating unnecessary technical debt. The system has a lot of usable features, but they don't funnel users toward the correct processes and practices.
This product is perhaps typical of something that seems as though it was conceived in the 90's and has seen various appendages since, none of which do their job particularly well. Nothing in this system is efficient and all its processes demand a huge, close to maximum possible level of human effort. No doubt many companies, such as my own are spend huge amounts of money for the debateable privilege of tripling their employees workload and making them as inefficient as possible to make the administration of the system seem more important than it actually is.
I feel like it is too heavy sometimes and updating is not very straight forward. For example, if I want to change an incident ticket (IN) to a service request (SR) and add some comment for the change, I have to first change the IN to SR, then click refresh which takes a few seconds, then add a comment. If I forget the refresh step, my comment will be discarded without warning like my ticket is not in the latest status. This also happens when somebody else changes the ticket during my edit as I can not lock the ticket exclusively.
At the moment we are required by contract to continue to use the IBM DOORS software for our current client. Given that it can be expensive, if we were to use it after our current client's needs were met, we would have to secure other projects in order to justify the continued use of the software.
The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.
Windchill is an extremely verbose and unintuitive system, with masses of unnecessary duplication of fields, convoluted workflows, unclear roles and terrible search capabilities. It is one of the worst software products I have ever seen to propose solving something that is actually factors quicker to do with manual writing and paper work
It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.
It was easier to do all the change management-related activities, even configurations were handled very effectively. New process definitions and initiatives made it easier for better project deliverables. Effective resource allocations and better reporting and defect management. The overall cost of the tool is great too and well within budget.
Windchill is having a great market share & its UI is simple & neat, integration with Creo & ERP system. These are the main reasons of considering Windchill by our organization.
It's part of CLM suite so it can be used to manage the whole lifecycle with tight integration with development module (Rational Team Concert) and quality module (Rational Quality Manager).
Comprehensive reports and dashboards provide better visibility.
Saves time as all of our drawings and business instructions and procedures are housed in a central location with check-in/out capability and version control.
