PTC Mathcad Prime is a digital engineering notebook enabling engineers, mathematicians, and scientists to solve, analyze, document, and share their calculations. It helps users to solve problems accurately the first time numerically and/or symbolically, and then reuse important intellectual property with templates to save time on the next project.
$735
per year
PTC Windchill
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
PTC offers Windchill, the company's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that includes BOM (a digital bill of materials) for cost and product quality control via parts-centric source of truth, dynamic and updated product change and configuration management to ensure up-to-date product information, industry standards and requirements validation and control, and role-based data access among other features.
It is definitely a must have for every design engineer. The formulas can be written in the expanded format which facilitates the process. The measurement unit feature is very useful and helps prevent errors in formulas. Mathcad is now equipped with a decent spell checker which is also very helpful.
It provides in-depth product information such as Technical Data, CAD model, 2D drawing, ECR document, ECN document. Integration between windchill and creo is seamless. In addition to it, it provides necessary tools for data transfer, distribution, reviewing, and publishing of product data. Moreover, one can manage the complete product life cycle just on the web.
Higher-order math, despite symbolics, become tedious and variable nomenclature isn't as forgiving as other programs. Due to it's sheet-like nature, the greater the complexity the more bothersome the screen usage becomes. But it's a trade-off between a sketchpad-like interface or lines and lines of code. Pick your poison but MathCad was our choice.
Windchill is an extremely verbose and unintuitive system, with masses of unnecessary duplication of fields, convoluted workflows, unclear roles and terrible search capabilities. It is one of the worst software products I have ever seen to propose solving something that is actually factors quicker to do with manual writing and paper work
It can be compared directly to any CMS at the base level. SharePoint/Drupal are in this category and support document versioning, search, collections. Furthermore, certainly in SharePoint you can build flows and manage system logic through power automate, SharePoint lists and power apps. Furthermore, it is possible to assign a multitude of roles/groups to SharePoint. SharePoint can present documents in-frame, it can search and so on. Where Windchill proposes to improve upon the CMS is in providing the roles and flows, in this case, specific to a QMS. Unfortunately it does not include the grass roots level build of something like SimplerQMS which incorporates even the generation of the required documents in phase through templates and suggestions. Windchill proposes to address the niche problem of an eQMS, without really providing anything that is implied by the "e" for electronic, meaning faster and more efficient. No, everything in Windchill is manual, intensive and convoluted. I don't have a good word to say about it.
Mathcad has allowed us to take legacy hand written calculations and document them in an electronic format. Now we can quickly run different design scenarios using the legacy calculations. It allows us to quickly vet new design options.
Sharing new design concepts is quicker and easier within our various design groups.
Saves time as all of our drawings and business instructions and procedures are housed in a central location with check-in/out capability and version control.
