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.
PV is great for developing new formulations and moving them to production without exporting to other software. It helps track raw materials for both lab and manufacturing use. Background work is required to add new raw materials to make them available, but it is not overwhelming or difficult, just tedious sometimes
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.
It makes it possible to move from lab to shop floor fast with accurate formulation tracking and versioning. The ability to cost out prototypes really helps when looing for material cost savings and formula optimization. It provides great theoretical properties to use in designed experiments generated by software such as Minitab.
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
ProductVision is more powerful and flexible, with the ability to calculate more theoretical properties and better search functions. PV integrates with other software systems better and is more compatible with software such as Excel and Minitab for functions such as statistical analysis and presentation preparation. Much more useful in general than BatchMaster.
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.
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.
