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?
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.
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