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.
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SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence is a manufacturing operations analytics application.
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.
SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence as a stand-alone platform seems to be quite powerful with a wide range of capabilities and integration options. The integration itself proved to be challenging which was mentioned before. We also had some issues with delays in data queries which resulted in delays of the visual representation on the SSCE dashboards.
MII is particularly good at providing and customizing dashboards for quick analysis of industrial IoT data.
MII also has built-in analysis functionality to make more sense of all the IoT data being streamed.
MII (and ME) are particularly effective at identifying outliers and problems with equipment/processes before they cause delays or other cascading issues. This allows for effective preventative maintenance.
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
If a proper UI5-based implementation is done, the system works at best if a proper application server and database exist. However, from a customization perspective and an easy-to-implement application-from-scratch perspective, MII is top-notch compared to the other mentioned systems. SAP ME sits on top of SAP MII as a foundation.
Documentation on some of our implementations was lacking. As an example, creating the query that reads the tag is explained through the documentation but this only explains very specific data models. Other models are not explained and take time to debug. Customer support was willing to help and an official note was created after we found some issues with the integration tools.
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.
SAP MII is a robust platform for data visualization and data integration. It isn't very intuitive and has the shortcomings explained throughout the review. It still uses old Java versions which is incompatible with updated versions. The SAP ME and SAP CP provide cloud-based solutions that seem to provide a more innovative approach.
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.
