Enable engineering and manufacturing concurrency.

As the design engineer defines the product, the integral nature of Windchill MPMLink enables the manufacturing engineer to access the designs and, without duplication, build out the mBOM.

By gaining access to the detailed product model, including visual display of embedded manufacturing information, 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 life cycle and configuration management capabilities within Windchill can then be utilized to efficiently manage all manufacturing deliverables.

Associate engineering and manufacturing BOMs.

Easily transform an engineering bill of materials into multiple manufacturing bills of materials and automatically create associativity links between the two. Multi-level BOM comparison reports enable you to quickly identify quantity discrepancies between associated BOMs. The standard Windchill view mechanism has been extended to support multiple BOM definitions and compositions using the same manufacturing part number.

Extend the Windchill change management process.

Given that 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 and mBOM links allow easy understanding of the potential impact to manufacturing. Visual indicators show the manufacturing engineer if the manufacturing design is out of date with the latest engineering design.

Digitally define and manage manufacturing resources and standards.

Digitally define and manage libraries of the resources and standards required to perform production activity. These manufacturing resource libraries include plants, work centers (work cell, line, resource pool, work station, work unit), tooling (tool, fixture), process materials and skills, as well as any standard procedures typically used.

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 re-purposed for future parts, or analyzed and exported to Microsoft Project.

Review and analyze process plans.

Review and analyze process plan definitions in an easy to use interactive Gantt chart, including resource usage and loading. The Windchill MPMLink Gantt Explorer can also export process plan information to Microsoft Project.

Dynamically generate 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 hyper-links to the referenced parts, resources, and documents.

Integrate with standard production systems.

Manufacturing deliverables created and managed in Windchill MPMLink can be sent to downstream production systems responsible for scheduling the production and managing the delivery of parts to different manufacturing facilities. This integration is available through PTC’s transactional-secure enterprise system integration technology, Windchill ESI and ERP Connector.