What’s New in Windchill

Windchill Workgroup Manager is the client application that manages CAD data from multiple CAD applications. Windchill Workgroup Manager has been improved to support back compatibility as well a degree of forward compatibility. This allows customers, including on-premises users, to decouple server and client application maintenance, significantly improving the upgrade experience.

Windchill 13 significantly improves the performance and scalability of 3D visualization for extremely large and complex product structures. QuickView enhances the visualization experience, making it more fluid and faster. With the increased complexity of products and processes, this capability is critical for OEMs and suppliers to collaborate efficiently, shorten the engineering lifecycle, and improve quality.

With QuickView you can visualize highly complex models resulting in much faster decision making and collaboration between engineering and manufacturing. End users can use QuickView to improve performance and scalability of large model visualization and then decide if they want to see some parts in the product structure in more detail. QuickView is CAD agnostic where thumbnails are supported and is available in many browser environments such as product structure browser, CAD Structure and BOM Transformer.

QuickView capability is an extremely useful enhancement to Windchill Smart Platforms by giving end users the ability to visualize highly complex configured assemblies in real time, supporting platform-based product design for the enterprise.

With Windchill Smart Platforms dynamic positioning capability designers can create a platform architecture that defines the interfaces across a product structure. This is done using positioning logic to build and visualize new product variants directly without the need to create multiple copies in CAD to manage variations in position. This allows you to capture design intent directly through new positioning architecture and use rules to control assembly logic and positioning.

Additionally, by exposing positioning intent directly from CAD construction geometry with the ability to dynamically position modules results in configured 3D digital mockup. This gives customers the ability to execute a modular product configuration strategy to create designs in a fraction of the time. End users also reduce engineering complexity and material costs, increase quality, and accelerate collaboration by implementing a Platform Architecture with Windchill. Smart Platforms capability can also be used with CATIA V5 and Siemens NX data allowing NX customers to leverage dynamic positioning to drive their modular product architecture.

Windchill 13 streamlines and simplifies the regulatory submission process powering the digital thread for the medical device industry. Through various enhancements to objects, including revision control, stakeholders can easily participate in the change process. Users can also add multiple subject links for various product families which includes supporting information with links.

With enhanced Unique Device Identifiers (UDI) support, Windchill 13 allows you to revise and make them part of the change process and add multiple subjects. You can also enable and configure cascading and tabular attributes, for a more streamlined process. Windchill 13 also adds support for leveraging the REST framework. This allows our customers and partners to tie these to electronic submissions and the regulatory update process.

Customers can take advantage of multiple improvements in Windchill 13 to visualize, synchronize, and extend the flow of information between engineering and manufacturing.

With the new QuickView mode in MPM, users can leverage improved visualization performance and scalability to visualize very large structures right in their manufacturing and process planning environments. The new automatic BOM transformation capability uses customer defined rules. This simplifies the process of viewing updates for the user, who can now take action easily instead of searching manually. This enhanced BOM transformation feature saves the user a significant amount of time.

Windchill 13 also brings enhancements in standard control characteristics by adding the ability to mass check in and check out, mass change, as well as a collector for standard control characteristics. This capability greatly enhances efficiency and saves time while defining and managing control characteristics.