We are looking at doing Adept PDM, we are pretty close to pulling the trigger. I thought that I had a pretty good handle on the costs from talking to the sales rep. The originally given costs had the upper limit of the one time set up costs at ~2/3 the costof buying the licenses and first year maintenance. Now that we have an actual quote a number of futher undisclosed one time set up costs have emerged so that the set up costs are more than the licenses and maintenance. I am starting to wonder if this is the right choice. I wonder how well we are going to be able to maintain a system that requires two weeks of implementation planning and on site set up (from Adept employees) for a small company with less than 10 users and a simple work flow. We don't have an IT person to deal with this.
Does anyone with Adept implementation/maintenence experience have any comments?
What happens in an Enterprise PDM inplementation for comparison? (We don't like Enterprise PDM and won't be going with it instead)
Message was edited by: Chuck Yeager
I looked at Adept and EPDM, and they seem pretty equivalent. One thing I didn't like about Adept is that their forum is locked, so you can't see discussions like this one. We are about to implement EPDM and I must say we are daunted by the number of setup choices and the amount of time it takes even for a "simple workflow". We have 6 SolidWorks seats and my workflow is way simple compared to some I have seen (I posted image here Re: Grade my workflow ,and I have cut out a few states since this draft). We are moving from no PDM.
I think WPDM or DB Works Express would be a lot easier to implement - you still have the file migration issue, but you don't have nearly as many choices to make. Apparently, with the power of EPDM and Adept comes responsibility. If we had been on SolidWorks Premium or Professional WPDM might have been the way to go.
My advice is definitely pay for migration help (if you have more than a few thousand files). And pay for some setup consultation, but you must spend some signficant time on the PDM Admin tool yourself (beyond training - we had 3 day Admin training), or you won't know how it really works... but you can probably figure out most changes you need to make, but that is just time later instead of up front time. And some choices are hard to undo. Each of the components (file cards, pdf task, workflow, templates, etc) in EPDM is fairly simple, it is just the combination that is a beast.
Also one of the big things you can't fully outsource is "what do you want?" this takes a ton of time and knowledge of how system and software functions to figure out. 2 weeks is unlikey to be the end of that process. In spite of all that, if you are going to do PDM it is worth doing right. What is another $10,000 or another week of setup effort compared to a year or 2 years of smoother work following that? That's not the only way I look at it, I also think it sucks, but I hope it is true we come through this with a great system.