Initial situation

• The transfer of product data such as material master, bill of materials and documents was done completely manual.
• Change operations were only executable with manual steps.
• The existing coupling between the Windchill and SAP systems could only partially cover the requirements.
• The material master creation through the interface was incomplete which created a lot of additional work.
• The drawings were not available in SAP.
• Due to the manual transfer, the material master data in PTC Windchill and SAP were inconsistent.
• The lifecycle status in Windchill and SAP was not always synchronized.
  

Customer requirements

• Automated interface transfer as well as quality improvement of the important master data, BOM and documents for more consistency.
• Transparent lifecycle status in both systems
• Clean cross-system change workflow
• Minimization of waiting times and efforts in master data maintenance as well as optimization of revisioning.
• Support of Windchill MPMLink functionalities
• Compatibility with SAP S/4Hana Public Cloud
• Released drawings and documents should be available in SAP and Windchill so that employees can find them in both systems without duplicates or incorrect revisions.
• Standardized and system-oriented processes

Implementation

• The interface allows the automatic creation or modification of material masters, document info sets and bills of material.
• The transfer is process-driven from the change notice workflow and promotion request workflow.
• If required, master data maintenance from Windchill to SAP can also be controlled or triggered via menu.
• All data is validated before transmission so that a minimal level of quality is ensured.
• The processes are standardized for all users.
• The system sovereignty with regard to parts data, parts lists and product-describing documents lies with the Windchill product management system.

Customer benefits

• Thanks to the introduced validations and the user-friendly operation of the interface, the number of people who can transfer materials to SAP has been increased, thus minimizing waiting times and effort.
• This reduced the need for key user support.
• Various validations detect errors even before a material is transferred to SAP.
• The interface's own error messages, which are more detailed than the messages generated by SAP, contribute to a better understanding by users.