°®¶¹´«Ã½app has been developing for years add-on solutions for PTC software users. I am regularly asked why are these solutions needed with the most comprehensive design tools like Creo and Windchill? It is true that PTC products are very powerful and contain many features. But there always are customer needs that are specific to a region or to a certain business. Since PTC needs to fulfill customer requirements from Japan to US and from SMEs to huge corporates, there is a need to add some adaptation to local market or business.
Driven from many years of Windchill and Creo implementations we develop our own applications, PDSAPPLICATIONS. Cover your need for agile and quality controlled product development. In addition to totally custom-made development projects, we have created both °®¶¹´«Ã½app and PLM packaged solutions. In this blog post I am going to shortly present our °®¶¹´«Ã½app solutions.
myPDS Classification
myPDS Classification is our first commercialized product. The product arose from realization that designers need to enter a lot of detailed information to °®¶¹´«Ã½app models and drawings. The information is then used in downstream business systems like Product Data Management (PDM) and/or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Many fields that are connected to each other, list of allowed terms, codes that are hard to remember lead quite often to a situation that information is missing, incomplete or wrong. Data cleaning takes place in different downstream systems. And that might make integrations impossible.
myPDS Classification gives designers an easy way to ensure that information is correct. The central management capabilities make sure that every designer regardless of location have same settings and rules applied to their designs. Settings can for example be list of allowed materials and their properties, dictionaries or dependencies between the fields. Tool is easy to use and administer. It can also be deployed from cloud for customers without server infrastructure.
myPDS Publish
One could say that myPDS Classification is a tool for getting data correctly into Creo and myPDS Publish is a tool for extracting it out. myPDS Publish creates deliverables in different formats such as transfer files for ERP, drawings as PDF files and 3D viewables. Information extracted can include metadata, material information, mass properties or geometrical information such as length of structural beams or blank dimensions of sheetmetal parts.
All this can be done for one file at a time or in a batch run. Typical use case for batch export is a need to create all project documents at once in the release of design documents. This task can take several hours in the end of a design to order project, if carried out manually. Creo Publish can save a lot time and increase quality of output.
myPDS Configurator
I am going to write a separate blog about different configurator approaches and solutions. Thus, I am only briefly mentioning our design automation tool myPDS Configurator. If a company delivers design to order products based on standard products, it really pays off to automate the design and drawing creation. We have seen reduction up to 80 % of engineering hours in delivery projects after automation. In such a case it is easy to justify the time spent in defining the configurable product structure.
myPDS Configurator is an engine that can create new models, assemble and remove modules, create drawings, drive dimensions and much more. 3D °®¶¹´«Ã½app models and drawings don’t contain any of the configuration logic or design intent after configuration run. This adds flexibility to process because it allows modifying the configurator created models and drawings. And flexibility is very often needed because achieving 100% automation level costs too much compared to leaving some manual work to process.
Best regards
Perttu