Item: PTC Windchill
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PTC Windchill

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PTC Windchill is used at my company for Quality Management System processes. Documentation upload and storage is aligned to the QMS lifecycle phases, with a variety of roles, routings and approvals similar to any other document management system with versioning, but with more stringent controls in place.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Windchill's representation feature is passible and at least it works - i.e. Uncontrolled representation copy vs original document, etc.
There is nothing else I can think of that Windchill does well
Still can't think of anything that Windchill does well

Cons

Search - the Windchill search engine is absolutely the worst I have ever used. It is inexcusably bad and has no intelligence features whatsoever, relying on extensive memorisation of wildcards akin to regular expressions to perform the simplest of tasks. The search will usually return hundreds or thousands of results for anything and also shows historical documents in those results.
Quality Management System - PTC Windchill is the worst possible implementation of a quality management system document repository that I could conceive of. The documentation phases are obscure, there is really no phased structure to the processes. The document features and relationships are tenuous at best. Yes, the changes table of a document is being handled through the Windchill process, but there is no relationship between say referenced systems and the document. Its just a document with no real living fields. Every task in this system takes hours and the pre-training requirements just to perform the simplest tasks are hours also. It's the worst.
The GUI for Windchill is awful, providing just dozens of text entry fields for each operation with often several duplicates of the same field in a single process. The task list requires multiple clicks to actually address the task. The documents are not even embedded into the webpage - in 2025 - so your local Downloads folder just because a trash pile repository of hundreds of documents.
Because it is so bureaucratic and inefficient, the system only knows to bombard all its roles with a multitude of emails to the point that I send them straight to my trash bin.

Return on Investment

Companies lack transparency when it comes to measuring the cost of Quality Management Systems and they very often are indeed uncosted and/or unpublished so there is little academic research on the negative effects. Not being privy to the actual figures I couldn't say, but through empirical observation I can suggest that there is a heavy cost and no return to the usage of this product for QMS.

Usability

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.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint, SimplerQMS and Drupal

It can be compared directly to any CMS at the base level. SharePoint/Drupal are in this category and support document versioning, search, collections. Furthermore, certainly in SharePoint you can build flows and manage system logic through power automate, SharePoint lists and power apps. Furthermore, it is possible to assign a multitude of roles/groups to SharePoint. SharePoint can present documents in-frame, it can search and so on. Where Windchill proposes to improve upon the CMS is in providing the roles and flows, in this case, specific to a QMS. Unfortunately it does not include the grass roots level build of something like SimplerQMS which incorporates even the generation of the required documents in phase through templates and suggestions. Windchill proposes to address the niche problem of an eQMS, without really providing anything that is implied by the "e" for electronic, meaning faster and more efficient. No, everything in Windchill is manual, intensive and convoluted. I don't have a good word to say about it.

Key Insights

Do you think PTC Windchill delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with PTC Windchill's feature set?

Did PTC Windchill live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of PTC Windchill go as expected?

Would you buy PTC Windchill again?

Other Software Used

ServiceNow IT Asset Management, MS SharePoint / SQL, draw.io, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Delinea Privilege Manager, Proofpoint Email Protection, BarTender, Jupyter Notebook

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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If you enjoy wasting time use PTC Windchill