What’s New in Windchill

As the foundation of the digital thread, Windchill 13 extends product data from engineering to downstream users in manufacturing and service to efficiently provide visibility and support collaboration. Information is available to the right person at the right time and in the right context. Establishing the foundation of enterprise PLM with a digital thread core of trusted product data enables global collaboration, concurrent manufacturing, and closed-loop quality.

Increasing continuity of data and processes between PLM and MES systems brings value to the enterprise in multiple areas:

• Improves manufacturing by connecting real-time technical data to the shop floor
• Reduces errors, rework, and waste through improved product data quality and accuracy between all key systems (PLM, ERP, MES)
• Speeds up time-to-market through reduced time-to-production ramp-up

Windchill 13 enables the enterprise to implement multiple manufacturing strategies with greater consistency, such as as-designed, as-planned, as-contracted, and as-built, to scale manufacturing and deliver more products to market.

With the latest release of Windchill Navigate, teams across your business better collaborate and harness the potential of trusted product data. Updates to the user experience, SaaS capabilities, interoperability, and PLM-based work instructions are some of the key improvements.

With Windchill Navigate, manufacturing engineers can now define associative, dense, and interactive work instructions that are change- and configuration-aware. The shop floor can access up-to-date, consistent, rich, and flexible technical data through digital 3D work instructions. And to close the loop, operators can provide feedback to engineering in real-time.

Windchill Navigate continues to improve collaboration by enhancing trusted product data with role- and task-based apps and providing real-time access to multi-system data sources, such as PLM, MES, and ERP.

Platform integration capabilities are greatly improved with new APIs for customization, integration, and automation. Windchill 13 integrates further into business systems, accelerating workflows and processes for accurate and faster decision-making across the enterprise.

This new release now leverages the Business Administrative Change (BAC) framework to automate change and release management. Windchill’s change deployment standardization increases operational efficiency by accelerating time-to-value and enabling agile configuration changes.

Platform upgrades can now be completed in half the time, conserving valuable time and resources. By processing reports faster than before, Windchill quickly gets customers the information they need to make decisions based on trusted product data, thereby improving quality and cost savings.

In Windchill 13, change management improvements further streamline the flow of trusted product data, allowing for accurate decision-making with upstream and downstream stakeholders. Improvements include mass variant generation in configuration management, an infrastructure of cascading attributes, multi-edit support, and dynamic positioning to manage higher levels of complexity.

Windchill 13 improves the regulatory framework for customers to build and extend applications to regulatory authorities at scale and with high quality. New capabilities include tracking and indexing market authorizations, support of multiple submission classes, and independent deployment of regulatory submission applications. This release delivers greater flexibility with version-agnostic updates, streamlined upgrades, and pluggable infrastructure components to accelerate development and revisions.