Creating a System of Product Intelligence With ECAD Integration
00:00 Hi, I'm Ruediger Scholz, Senior Product Manager in the Windchill PLM business. I've been with PTC for over 13 years focused on our ECAD integration strategy. Today I'm going to talk to you about managing information from different disciplines in Windchill and how a strong digital thread benefits mechatronic product design. Today's products are becoming exponentially more complex each year. Consumers are demanding and expecting more smart, connected products.
00:34 Demands for environmental compliance are becoming more restrictive, and general disruption is constant and often unpredictable, such as supply chain availability, new startup, and other unforeseen challenges. This is valid across industry, whether you're a startup or a large enterprise company. In order to remain competitive, companies need to ensure they are ready and have the ability to respond and adapt to the latest needs.
01:05 However, electronic design has been on the fringes of data management. In fact, it is still essential that way today, and this can cause some major headaches when it comes to integrating design data with other data management tools and exchanging data between functions and organizations. To address these challenges, PTC can help you to build a digital foundation that creates visibility into and alignment within your operations,
01:36 leveraging connectivity, governance, and modern processes. You can then extend that digital foundation to share data and insights between functions. This provides a holistic view on the overall engineering process, as the design of a product nowadays includes different disciplines like MCAD, ECAD, and software. This enables teams to work cross-functionally by providing access to data in real time
02:06 and delivering the data in context, whether it be across functions, divisions or external partners. Managing design information across disciplines, whether it is mechanical, electronic, electrical, or software design, is key for a true digital thread solution. But I'm not talking about those data silos initiated in the past separating the different engineering departments. In your real products
02:37 different disciplines interlock with each other to build a better product. And so PTC Windchill offers the ability to combine all the different information, whether of a complex product or a single component, to build a digital model. By embracing this part centric approach, the focus of organization is no longer on single pieces of information, but on the bill of material, also called BOM. Think about the bill of material like a recipe of the product definition,
03:09 and therefore it has to be multi-dimensional and multidisciplinary. Let me explain this. Perhaps your product definition process starts with a breakdown of functions and assigning requirements to functional components. So you will have a functional bill of materials besides your engineering BOM. Or maybe you have considered different levels of inhouse production for your manufacturing sites across the globe. With the right BOM strategy and system,
03:40 organizations can capture, configure, and manage product information during every step of the product lifecycle with a complex digital product definition. They can increase efficiency without compromising their ability to release high quality, innovative products to the market. A complete digital product definition acts as a digital representation of a product or products and a single source of truth to all related artifacts. Which means CAD models, drawings,
04:14 requirements, part structures, and other relevant information. Such product definition gives you the ability to fully assess the impact of a change across the product structure that might lead to costly development issues and potential critical time to market delays. Just think about rockets and launch schedules. Now that you understand the value that PTC Windchill's approach on multidisciplinary BOM brings to your company, you might ask where should
04:46 the digital transformation start? To combine data from different disciplines in a single bill of material, the first step is to unlock your design information and to integrate them into your PLM system. PTC Windchill allows a variety of integrations from different engineering tools, whether they belong to the mechanical, electronic, or electrical domain. I will focus on the ECAD integrations here. There's also a session with my colleague
05:17 Steve Shaw, who will provide more information on our MCAD integrations. For the ECAD integrations PTC has established partnerships with the different ECAD vendors like Zuken, Altium, Siemens CDA, and Cadence. These partners provide integrations by connecting their team data management solutions to Windchill. This includes Altium Nexus or Zuken DSCR, and DS-E3, just to name a few.
05:49 Also, XPLM joined the group of ECAD integration partners as a vendor neutral provider for additional solutions that can integrate the ECAD authoring applications directly to Windchill. The partners use Windchill more than REST services for their integrations, which allows easy implementation regardless of whether Windchill is running on premise or in the cloud. All integrations provide capabilities for design data management,
06:21 for storing schematic and layout design information, and the relationship in Windchill, and component metadata synchronization to keep component information in sync between the ECAD tools library and Windchill. Now, electronic design projects can be easily included as a part of a managed process within the context of the digital thread. The actual source and manufacturing files associated with printed circuit board designs can be managed side by side.
06:54 Design visualizations can be communicated without access to native authoring applications. BOMs can be created automatically from designs to eliminate manual entry methods and errors, and information sharing with vendors and suppliers is simplified. No more exchanging data via email or FTP. Of all the customers that I talked to, incorrect, missing, or wrong data versions are one of the most reported issues when
07:24 it comes to managing and sharing data once the project is complete. By integrating your ECAD design data to Windchill, these potential errors can be virtually eliminated as updates are continually maintained and communicated, providing full traceability and history of who did what, when, and why. I just talked about how ECAD integration gives better insights to the project status for all involved members.
07:56 One important piece here is the visualization of ECAD design. Whether it is schematic information or layout. You all know the saying, a picture is worth 1000 words. Every time design information is updated in Windchill that information will be published automatically so anyone with permission can interact with the design information using Creo View ECAD. Creo View ECAD is PTC's mature, field proven technology for enterprise
08:28 wide sharing, reviewing, annotating, and verifying of electronic design intent. It includes important capabilities critical to helping today's designers meet the growing need to produce high quality electronic components faster than ever before. Some of the capabilities include the following; view schematic or layout design information; query intelligent ECAD design pin,
08:58 net, and component data to verify design intent; highlight, measure, and identify design issues without the EDA tools; Mark-ups to communicate with internal design engineering, test and manufacturing teams; cross highlight between the schematic, layout, and even 3D geometry. This is actually an important point that highlights the competitive advantage you get by managing different design information side by side.
09:31 Teams from different disciplines can easily review the impact of a design change by identifying relevant information from each domain in a single tool. Creo View also includes rich compare functionality that allows comparison of different schematics and layouts, but also comparison of schematic and layout or even Gerber files that contain manufacturing information. By utilizing PTC's visualization technology,
10:01 time spent identifying design modifications by cross functional teams is reduced and accuracy and efficiency of change review is increased. I have talked about the advantages that are gained by the information attached to a multidisciplinary bill of material. Now I want to focus on the pieces that actually made up the bill of material, component and their management. Component management is one of the main
10:31 areas where the old adage, there is never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over, comes into play. Component management is one of the most important aspects of laying a solid foundation for a strong digital thread, as it involves many people and processes across the company, including engineering, component management, procurement, and the supply chain. With today's parts and material
11:02 shortages, it has become imperative that on-demand visibility into part availability is accessible at the engineers' desktop so that they can make educated and informed choices when selecting parts for their designs. It is also important to ensure that supplier management and approved vendors and manufacturers are exposed real time in order to gain economies of scale when sourcing required parts.
11:33 In the past, ECAD and MCAD, PLM and other processes, operated independently, each with their own parts and part management system. By including ECAD in the digital thread, this and all previously disjointed processes are performed real time in parallel, removing the need for the manual communication processes of the past. For example, while the ECAD team is
12:03 working, we can start building the bill of material that will be used for component engineering and procurement to start reviewing and sourcing. Adding a new part request workflow provides a repeatable way to both request and approve new parts. This drives part reusage, a key to reduce costs and decrease efficiency across the enterprise as new parts can cost thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.
12:34 It also ensures part library integrity so that there is a common level of information whether data is accessed by electronic, electrical designers or others. Once this foundation is set, PTC Windchill's integration to Silicon Expert can enrich existing component and supplier information automatically. This allows intelligent insights to supplied parts across the company.
13:04 The connector provides seamless access to data sheets, REACH and RoHS compliance and even obsolescence information directly from within Windchill. Along with supplier information, approved vendors and approved part information, this will ensure quality of results also abbreviate SQR. Let me summarize the benefits of incorporating electronic design data into the digital thread in building a system of product intelligence.
13:39 It will ensure that the right people are working on the right version of the right data. It will provide visibility of design status to all assigned team members. It eliminates error prone manual and/or disconnected data management methods. It will allow easy location and reuse of design data. It will facilitate online virtual production team collaboration and provide traceability of supply chain partners.
14:18 Also, with the ability to collaborate seamlessly across the engineering domain, improved supplier management and automated engineering data and eBOM generation. You can also verify product level compliance for environmental, military, or corporate requirements. I would like to end the session with a customer story from iRobot. IRobot is a great example of an organization that has followed
14:52 a digital transformation by integrating multidisciplinary bill of materials. After iRobot was faced with a corporate mandate, they set a goal to establish a cross-organizational data management strategy. There were several critical steps they took to transform their digital practices. The results speak for themselves. Structure engineering BOM, visualization, and reporting.
15:22 They introduced a complete bill of material that accurately reflects mechanical design, documentation, electrical software, links to downstream ERP and manufacturing processes, sheets, and view builds, part classification, and part reuse. IRobot is able to avoid part duplication and the cost of time searching for parts that already exist.
15:53 Pick and click cross discipline change management. The operations team now is aware of changes and their impact and changes are streamlined through the organization. Supply chain data sharing outside Windchill environment through packages. Vendor quote packages used to take eye iRobot engineers upwards of two weeks to put together depending on the quality of the design.
16:24 Now this is an automated process. Component and supplier management, which allows their sourcing and operations team to have much more accurate data to make purchasing decisions that they have never prior to this. Using Windchill, you too can easily transform your disjointed tools, people, and processes and take the next step towards implementing your own digital thread. Thank you for your time today.
16:56 Take care and goodbye,