Use this guide to plan, design, develop and deploy these changes to your Windchill PLM solution. This guide provides step-by-step instructions and key objectives as you plan to streamline your customizations and make decisions based on what your organization's needs to succeed with the Windchill PLM solution.
The information in this guide is useful for:
The word streamline is used throughout this Success Path. Streamlining means returning your Windchill PLM solution to follow PTC's best practices to work as fast and easy as possible for your organization.
The process to streamline your Windchill PLM solution is not typically something that happens all at once. Start by examining your current Windchill PLM solution setup, comparing your setup to PTC's best practices, reviewing available functionality, and evaluating which customizations to remove over time.
Why consider streamlining?
Streamlining has two main parts:
The Windchill PLM solution is designed to be fast and easy to use. Offering multiple ways to meet business needs the Windchill PLM solution provides a strategic way to monitor, track, and manage people, information, and processes at every phase of your product's lifecycle, from initial planning to retirement. This includes out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality, which provides pre-defined options and is available immediately after installation.
However, you may have customized your Windchill PLM solution in the past to meet your specific business needs. Now, your organization wants to streamline your Windchill PLM solution to achieve new business needs, upgrade the software, reduce overall costs, improve system performance, or meet other business requirements.
You may want to streamline your Windchill PLM solution to:
Maintenance usually accounts for the highest cost for maintaining a highly customized PLM solution. You may decide that your organization can get more value from Windchill PLM solution without some or all your current customizations. Streamlining your Windchill PLM solution to OOTB functionality may align better with your business needs.
If you want a SaaS option for your Windchill PLM solution, PTC has introduced Windchill+. Windchill+ offers:
You'll get the Windchill PLM experience you've come to trust in a PTC-hosted and cloud-based service.
You are not currently eligible for Windchill+ if your Windchill PLM solution has the following customizations or integrations:
If you're unsure if you have any of these customizations in your Windchill PLM solution, PTC's Windchill Performance Advisor can help assess your system.
Begin the process of streamlining your Windchill PLM solution if you're interested in what Windchill+ can offer but may not be eligible yet.
For more details about Windchill+, reach out to your customer success manager or sales representative.
Your Windchill PLM Solution incorporates the needs of people in your organization, the business, and your organization's processes and data. To determine how to streamline your Windchill PLM Solution, identify the gap between the latest available OOTB functionalities and your Windchill PLM's current customizations. Think about your solution needs on a financial and functional level. Ask yourself:
Deciding how to streamline your Windchill PLM solution is an important decision. Certain factors help determine if this is the right decision for your organization. This process is extensive, and the outcome impacts different teams and other systems. Understanding what happens when you remove customizations is a great place to start.
This Success Path has four phases:
In this phase, your organization should plan how to allocate resources for the project and set an expected timeline for production. This phase includes cross-functional collaboration, requirements gathering, standard system maintenance, quality assurance, a change management plan, and training updates. In this phase, you must know and understand your existing customizations and the business needs they were created to meet. Then, determine if any available OOTB functionalities meet that same business need. Finally, refer to the latest product version for all its OOTB functionalities.
In the design phase, you're designing a solution with fewer customizations. You'll need to discuss and confirm details about configuring OOTB functionalities to meet your current customizations' exact business needs. This is the ideal time to plan what you do with your organization's current data, consider how a new design works with configuration limitations, prepare for implementation, begin documenting your use case, and prepare for testing. You'll want to consult other stakeholders about how to manage your data.
In the development phase, you should know and understand useful OOTB functionalities that are available and the customizations to remove to access them. It's beneficial to revisit stakeholders to confirm how to manage your current and future data. This is a tactical step, so be sure you take the approved approach to manage your organization's data.
The deployment phase is where the plan, design and develop phases comes together. Testing and validating the system will occur as well as communication to users regarding the rollout plan. The phase also includes the run up and execution of the go-live. Prepare for the implementation team to provide support after go live and begin to measure the impact of the application.
These four phases will help streamline customizations and handle other changes necessary to complete the project successfully.
A Success Path is an online guide to help you implement a specific PTC product at your organization. Each path provides step-by-step instructions from the early planning stages all the way through to deployment. Use a Success Path to help your organization get the most out of a product and achieve your business goals.
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