As you plan your Windchill Integration for MES implementation, you should consider the ways in which Windchill Integration for MES can support your business activities. Thinking about how you want to support these activities would also help you decide which configuration options to select and if you need to add any custom functionality.

The following lists high-level decisions that you need to make regarding the role Windchill Integration for MES has in supporting your business processes.

Decide which business scenarios you want to support when integrating your Windchill PDMLink data with your MES distribution targets. There are many ways in which this integration can provide value to your company and Windchill Integration for MES supports publishing product information from Windchill with pre-built business logic and configuration options.

Decide which business objects are important to your MES distribution target. This would help you determine which objects should be published from Windchill PDMLink.

Determine critical attributes for Windchill PDMLink and the distribution target systems, and any special Windchill PDMLink and distribution target business rules that are related to the objects and attributes.

Determine which application is the system of record for each piece of information. This would also help define what objects and attributes should be published from Windchill PDMLink, and whether any business processes or systematic restriction should be applied within your MES distribution targets. .

Decide if Windchill PDMLink would manage your engineering change process. This decision would help determine whether the product information that you publish would be driven by the life cycles of enterprise change notices or the life cycles of parts.

Decide if you want to publish an as-designed or as-planned product structure. By default, Windchill ESI publishes the as-designed view of a product structure. However, Windchill PDMLink supports the ability to manage plant-specific views of product structures. Therefore, it is possible to do manufacturing planning within Windchill PDMLink and publish the as-planned product structures directly to the plants in your MES distribution target. Before installing and configuring Windchill ESI, you should decide whether you want to do manufacturing planning inWindchill PDMLink or in your MES distribution target.

Decide if you plan to customize the Windchill PDMLink business objects to add special attributes or capabilities. If so, you may want to consider publishing these attributes or characteristics to your MES distribution target.

Decide if your business can comply with the design assumptions of Windchill Integration for MES. Review your assumptions and considerations listed above to understand the design assumptions that are critical to the success of a Windchill Integration for MES deployment. If you are unable to comply with any of the assumptions, you may need to consider customizing to meet your company's unique needs.

Determine and plan for anticipated data transfer frequency and volume.

Material effectivity is usually used to represent the first time a part has been made available to a plant. It is not used to determine when a new part would be included into a product, and has no impact on production runs that generate production orders. This is because effectivity has no real meaning in MES unless it’s in the context of the material produced. BOM effectivity is used to control the actual incorporation date of parts into the built product. BOM effectivity is used in production runs, which in turn drive the production orders that are required to build the product.

For object-centric releases, there is no effectivity set on objects. For CN-centric releases, all materials will have effectivity equal to the day the transaction was published; all BOMs will have effectivity equal to the effectivity set in the CN task that had the BOM listed as a resulting item; and the CN’s effectivity in MES will be equal to the earliest effectivity on the CN. If materials are created or changed, that will be equal to the day of the release.

Once you review these and make your decisions, you will be prepared to make informed choices when configuring Windchill Integration for MESand be able to smoothly integrate the PLM services offered by Windchill PDMLink with the services offered by your distribution targets.