PLM: ProductCenter from TechSoft

Anybody have any experience with ProductCenter from TechSoft? Our
manufacturing people are looking at it pretty seriously. It's a SW Gold
Partner, but how well does it work in real life?


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Hi Jerry.

We use product center here (I use and administer):

A brief synopsis:

Support - Awesome.

Daily use - very good.

Configurability - very good.

Reliability - reasonable.

Cost - ok.

Security / Permission tunability - great.

Versatility - good - manage any files you want (not cad only "slant").

Downside - for it to work well, everyone must be willing to use it.

Legacy data - tough to vault with "retroactive" history, but once in
will establish a history.

Needed support personnel - ability to configure services and run
queries are helpful.

Software patch - server / client need same revision - all systems
upgraded at once.

Also needs oracle runtime license.

All said, it's a good robust product that will do what they claim it
will do.

Thanks,

SMA

 

Any idea how this compares to "high end" PLM such as Smarteam or Windchill?

 

Any idea how this compares to "high end" PLM such as Smarteam or Windchill?

In my estimation, it is in same segment (it is high end). It has
oracle based encrypted vault, good scalabliity and is designed as an
"enterprise wide" solution.

How they compare specifically feature for feature, I cannot say (no
direct experience with the others).

Product center has plenty of horsepower to meet all of ones needs.
It's robust, pretty well behaved and has a slew of "additional"
capabilities and extensions (cad add ons, workflow, bom configurator)
as well as a wide range of standard configuration abilities.

Our implementation here is fairly plain vanilla (not too customized).

Regards,

SMA

 

Thank, Sean. Just the type of feedback I was looking for.

My apologies to the people at SofTech for my temporary dyslexia!


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

I can attest to the ProductCenter vs. SmarTeam comparison first-hand,
having replaced SmarTeam in our company with ProductCenter.
ProductCenter doesnt have all the fancy functionality that SmarTeam
has "out-of-the-box", but our experience was that the majority of that
"functionality" that SmarTeam liked to talk about was either rarely
needed or took heavy custom coding to "adapt" it to our environment.
ProductCenter concentrates on core functionality while still providing
a full-featured API for customization. Having been down both roads, I
much prefer the ProductCenter route.

In response to SMA's synopsis, I would upgrade his reliability grade
to very good, the key being a solid hardware platform. The cost
difference between ProductCenter and SmarTeam for our implementation
amounted to a difference of ~$2000. I would also agree that the
support is awesome.

Brad

 

Kind of sounds like Solidworks used to be. Then they started adding all
that fancy stuff and it started degrading.