If you enjoy wasting time use PTC Windchill
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
PTC Windchill is used at my company for Quality Management System processes. Documentation upload and storage is aligned to the QMS lifecycle phases, with a variety of roles, routings and approvals similar to any other document management system with versioning, but with more stringent controls in place.
Pros
- Windchill's representation feature is passible and at least it works - i.e. Uncontrolled representation copy vs original document, etc.
- There is nothing else I can think of that Windchill does well
- Still can't think of anything that Windchill does well
Cons
- Search - the Windchill search engine is absolutely the worst I have ever used. It is inexcusably bad and has no intelligence features whatsoever, relying on extensive memorisation of wildcards akin to regular expressions to perform the simplest of tasks. The search will usually return hundreds or thousands of results for anything and also shows historical documents in those results.
- Quality Management System - PTC Windchill is the worst possible implementation of a quality management system document repository that I could conceive of. The documentation phases are obscure, there is really no phased structure to the processes. The document features and relationships are tenuous at best. Yes, the changes table of a document is being handled through the Windchill process, but there is no relationship between say referenced systems and the document. Its just a document with no real living fields. Every task in this system takes hours and the pre-training requirements just to perform the simplest tasks are hours also. It's the worst.
- The GUI for Windchill is awful, providing just dozens of text entry fields for each operation with often several duplicates of the same field in a single process. The task list requires multiple clicks to actually address the task. The documents are not even embedded into the webpage - in 2025 - so your local Downloads folder just because a trash pile repository of hundreds of documents.
- Because it is so bureaucratic and inefficient, the system only knows to bombard all its roles with a multitude of emails to the point that I send them straight to my trash bin.
Return on Investment
- Companies lack transparency when it comes to measuring the cost of Quality Management Systems and they very often are indeed uncosted and/or unpublished so there is little academic research on the negative effects. Not being privy to the actual figures I couldn't say, but through empirical observation I can suggest that there is a heavy cost and no return to the usage of this product for QMS.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft SharePoint, SimplerQMS and Drupal
Other Software Used
ServiceNow IT Asset Management, MS SharePoint / SQL, draw.io, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Delinea Privilege Manager, Proofpoint Email Protection, BarTender, Jupyter Notebook
