Pdmworks Enterprise vs. team center

In April 2007 I put together a short presentation that answers a lot of questions that people have about PDMWE. It doesn't cover everything and it's a bit dated, but still has some good stuff. You can grab it and take a look - it might help you.

www.kcswug.com/documents/PDMWE WT presentation.pdf

WT

Depends on what you need. Teamcenter is a lot higher level and does a lot more but will cost much more.....about 4x the cost in our case.

I have implemented Teamcenter Engineering (not the Express version), Intralink, and PDMWorks Enterprise. The install and configuration of Teamcenter was a nightmare. It took months to finally get it production ready. The interface hard to use, the terminology ambiguous and confusing, and the error messages were cryptic or non-existent. Upgrades the and patches were difficult and time consuming. Many times I had to upgrade or patch all of the clients which couldn't be done remotely. It is true that Teamcenter has a lot of capability, but the software required a large amount of support and each added feature that we used required even more support.

Installing and configuring PDMWorks Enterprise was actually fun compared to Teamcenter. We had the software production ready in a couple of weeks. It does 95% of what we required with out customizations and little in the way of compromises. I have only been using it for a little while now so I still haven't explored every nook and cranny (i.g. I haven't had to upgrade it yet, or make significant changes to match new business practices). Our implementation went so smoothly I now have time to plan some customizations (add-ins) I would like to create. Having looked into the API, even that seems reasonably straightforward for someone who has some programming knowledge.

I hope this was helpful.

Josh,
We recently spent 3 months evailuating the big PLM suppliers; Matix One, Product Center, Teamcenter, Windchill, and Aras for a PLM solution. All of them, except for Aras, requires you use their vault for CAD data. Needless to say we went with Aras. We are already on EPDM which we implemented two years ago and use SolidWorks and AutoCAD. We tride to implement Smarteam for 3 years with no luck (thank goodness). I did most of the implimentation of EPDM with a little help from our VAR and have upgraded 3 times since. The upgrades are a breeze compared to the others from what I understand. The big boys wanted $25K just to help upgrade every 12 months or so in addition to subscription support - WOW! Sounds like they need to work on their programming methods if it is that hard to upgrade. Some of them wouldn't even quote a price for tech support which tells me they stick it to you when you need their help.
I am kind of bias because I love EPDM. It is the ideal PDM software if you work with SolidWorks and Acad (plus it accepts all other file types). Support is excellent (depending on your SW VAR) and the ease of use on the user side is second to none. Not to mention the tight integration with SolidWorks.
I have heard others say Teamcenter is at a higher level but I do not really understand that feedback. Anything is doable when it comes to software depending how much money and time you are willing to spend. EPDM can do everything the bigger companies can as long as you are willing to spend time and money. Fortunately we are still running out of the box with only two add-ins.

We are running 200 seats of EPDM with 140 SolidWorks and 94 Autocad users. It is installed on about 1200 machines and is replicated to 3 other sites. I feel we haven't come close to reaching its limit.

Hope this helps in the decision making process.