Windchill

Windchill MPMLink FAQ

1. What is Windchill MPMLink?
2. What are the key capabilities of Windchill MPMLink?
3. What benefits can Windchill MPMLink provide?
4. What’s the difference between using Windchill MPMLink versus an ERP system for MPM?
5. What’s the difference between using Windchill MPMLink versus other PLM vendor solutions for MPM?
6. What is the status of the Polyplan product that was acquired by PTC?
7. How can I learn more about Windchill MPMLink?
8. When will Windchill MPMLink be available?

What is Windchill MPMLink?

Windchill MPMLink is a new, optional Windchill PDMLink module designed specifically to support the Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) Process. As a key component of PTC’s solutions for digital manufacturing, it improves manufacturing business processes and addresses the everyday needs of designers, tooling engineers, and manufacturing engineers. The PLM industry’s first integral MPM solution, Windchill MPMLink helps achieve manufacturing excellence by enabling true concurrent product and process development. By offering MPM capabilities integral with the PTC Product Development System (PDS), PTC helps manufacturing engineers improve manufacturing processes and reduce errors between product design and manufacturing engineering, while delivering a quickly deployable solution for a rapid return on investment.

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What are the key capabilities of Windchill MPMLink?

• Digitally define, manage and reuse process plans. Digitally define plant-specific process plans as a set of sequences and operations which in turn define how a part is manufactured, assembled, reworked, repaired, maintained and/or inspected. Such digital process plans can then be easily reused and repurposed for future parts.
• Associative eBOMs and mBOMs. Easily transform engineering bills of materials (eBOM) into multiple manufacturing bills of materials (mBOM) and automatically create associativity links between the two.
• Digitally define and manage manufacturing resources and standards. Digitally define and manage libraries of the resources required to perform production activity. These libraries include plants, work centers (cell, line, resource pool, station, work unit), tooling (tool, fixture), process materials and skills.
• An integral part of the Product Development System (PDS). As the design engineer creates the product, the integral nature of Windchill MPMLink allows the manufacturing engineer to access the designs and, without duplication, build up the manufacturing Bill of Material (mBOM). By gaining access to the detailed product model, including visual display of embedded manufacturing information such at GD&T specifications, the manufacturing engineer now has an in-depth and up-to-date understanding of the design. The manufacturing resources are defined in the same system and associated to the operation. The powerful lifecycle and configuration management capabilities within Windchill can then be utilized to manage these mBOMs, process plans, and resources.
• Dynamically generated visual work instructions. Use Windchill MPMLink to dynamically generate work instructions for a specific configuration of a process plan. Work instructions include process plan information, operation descriptions, time breakdowns, part and resource lists, associated documents, a display window and change history. The work instructions are accessed from a web browser and include hyperlinks to the referenced parts, resources and documents.
• Integral change management. Because both design and manufacturing engineering are now using a single system, the engineering change management process can be easily extended to include manufacturing. When a design engineer is considering a change, the associative eBOM/mBOM links allow easy understanding of the potential manufacturing impact. Visual indicators show the manufacturing engineer if the mBOM is out of date with the latest eBOM.

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What benefits can Windchill MPMLink provide?

With the digital manufacturing capabilities of Windchill MPMLink, manufacturers can reduce manufacturing costs, improve product and data quality, reduce scrap and rework, improve accuracy of manufacturing deliverables, and shorten development cycle time by concurrently developing the product designs and the manufacturing processes. This is especially important to manufacturing industries that must continually deliver new, innovative products with extreme cost and time-to-market pressures.

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What’s the difference between using Windchill MPMLink versus an ERP system for MPM?

ERP systems were not designed for product development and the management of rapidly changing product and process designs. ERP systems also don’t have access to the source design data. Because Windchill MPMLink is an integral component of PTC’s Product Development System, process designs can be developed concurrently with the product design; thus speeding time to market and reduce late-stage changes. Implementing changes that could affect both the product design and manufacturing processes is much more efficient with Windchill MPMLink. Of course, ERP systems need the resulting process designs in the form of routings in order to schedule production and inventory. Windchill MPMLink can be integrated with ERP systems to automatically transfer key MPM outputs, such as the production-ready process plans and Manufacturing Bill-Of-Materials (mBOM).

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What’s the difference between using Windchill MPMLink versus other PLM vendor solutions for MPM?

Windchill MPMLink focuses on solving the daily issues that manufacturing engineers face – making sure their process plans, manufacturing bill of materials (mBOMs), and work instructions accurately reflect the current engineering design. Other solutions center on factory and robot simulation, highly-specialized applications, as the foundation of their acquired manufacturing group of products. Such simulation-based, non-integral solutions do not offer manufacturing engineers much help with their daily task of managing process plans and related manufacturing data. As the only MPM solution to be an integral part of a world-class PLM system, Windchill MPMLink gives manufacturing engineers direct access to the latest product designs. This allows them to closely work with design engineering, to easily repurpose design data for mBOMs, to create and manage process plans in the same system as the design data, and to participate fully in the engineering change process.

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What is the status of the Polyplan product that was acquired by PTC?

PTC believes that in order to have an efficient MPM process, manufacturing planning capabilities must be an integral part of a PLM system. This allows manufacturing engineers to best leverage the product design, eliminate redundant work, and develop concurrently with design engineering. Thus, PTC chose not to sell Polyplan as a separate bolt-on product, but revise Polyplan’s technology to become an integral part of Windchill. The result of that is Windchill MPMLink.

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How can I learn more about Windchill MPMLink?

If you are a current PTC customer, please contact your PTC sales representative for more information. For additional information available online, please visit the Windchill MPMLink product page.

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When will Windchill MPMLink be available?

First customer ship (FCS) of Windchill MPMLink is scheduled to be part of the Windchill 9.0 FCS release, which is currently planned for September 2007.

NOTE: The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.