PDM to MRP

Hello Hans,

For communication with any ERP system we always ask the following questions:

1) Does it use a relational database such as SQL Server or Oracle?

2) Does it allow third-party access to information?

3) For companies wanting to take PDMWorks data entered to their ERP system, is a data map (schema) available to determine where the incoming data fields can be placed?

If you would like to discuss this more, feel free to contact us.

Best regards,

Bob Hanson Senior SolidWorks Applications Developer Centare Group Ltd.

Hans, you have hit upon a great challange here. i have tried to interconnect PDM and MRP before with little success. this was 7 years ago. have not tried this in latest softwares.

primary concerns were that you need to specify which one is the master and which one is the slave. now from an engineering standpoint, i believe that the CAD is the master. from a MRP standpoint, i believe that the MRP is the master. at that time the link was a one way road, and it had a lot of potholes. we spent excessive time and money trying to make it work and in the end we scrapped the concept. we found that hiring an individual to replicate drawings parts listings into the MRP was cheeper. and as long as only one individual was working this angle we had minimal problems.

i currently run ProductCenter for my PDM. and i have looked into this for this program and it was not even cut and dry yet. one good thing i found was the database for PDM and future MRP/ERP was the same, oracle. we are still contemplating this but again the cost could be 50K to get it fully integrated, time and programming, and errorless as possible. even now i contemplate the cost of doing this and maintenence over the upcomming years. this could well exceed 100K in 5 years, this is not good.

i like the concept of the interconnectivity but i find the way to get there is a long walk on the FAR SIDE. if you get any good results i believe that others will want to hear about them. iQ

I know many companies that use DBWorks PDM w/Solidworks that push and pull information between PDM and ERP's/MRP's . This is achieved by using industry standard software and as most ERPs amd MRP's are ODBC compliant. DBWorks is designed and certified to work with Access, MSDE, SQL, and/or Oracle on the same Microsoft operating systems supported by SolidWorks.

George,

Rumour has it that DBWorks will expand its existing SAP ERP integration module to work with other ERP systems.

Any truth to this?

Len K. Mar President E-data Solutions