CAPABILITIES

Part selection processes can vary dramatically between engineers, divisions, and partners. Without standardized methods for selection, identical parts can be assigned multiple tracking numbers and ordered from different suppliers at varying rates. This results in administrative overhead, low-volume purchasing rates, extensive spare-part tracking, and high inventories.

The Windchill Sourcing Factor! solves problems by allowing companies to create a consolidated source of part information. This ensures that everyone involved with the product has easy access to existing internal part information and commercially available solutions. The effect is an increase in the reuse of existing and commercially available parts and a reduction in procurement and development costs.

Rapid business expansion, mergers, and acquisitions can create fragmented buying practices and complex supply chains. The Windchill Sourcing Factor! optimizes the inbound supply chain by matching suppliers with specific parts. Once linked with the part standardization processes, suppliers can be consolidated, classified, and ranked for individual or categories of parts. This allows unnecessary part sources to be eliminated, which lets companies take advantage of volume discounts, keeps inventory low, and ensures that the quality of parts is consistent.

A major contributor to part proliferation is the lack of coordination between procurement and design. Engineers select parts based on design requirements, whereas procurement looks at the business costs of purchasing and maintaining parts. Both decisions are based on partial information.

The Windchill Sourcing Factor! bridges the gap between procurement and design by incorporating design and business information into the part definition. This feature assists engineers in choosing preferred, reusable parts, and it also gives them access to other critical information about the part, such as its past performance, potential problems, current release state, cross-product uses, changes, delivery issues, and obsolescence. Having a single part definition ensures the consistency and accuracy of information so that all parties can make informed decisions.

Engineers often find it harder to locate a previously used part than to simply request a new one. This lack of availability can result in products with high numbers of unique parts, which is costly. The Windchill Sourcing Factor! reduces the number of unique parts by making it easy for engineers to quickly locate an existing or commercially available part and access other information necessary to make their decision. Identified parts are sorted and color-coded to indicate preferred business usage and sources.

In the early phases of a product's development, certain information on part property may be flexible. The Windchill Sourcing Factor! gives engineers the flexibility to relax noncritical requirements and loosely specify properties so they can identify similar or equivalent parts for reuse. This capability helps to identify part alternatives that would not otherwise be considered.

Online part libraries provide access to up-to-date information on commercial parts. The accuracy of these libraries is ensured as they are built, quality controlled, and maintained through contractual agreements with part suppliers. They contain an industry-accepted classification structure and normalized property values, part specification sheets, and 3D CAD models, which can be downloaded and used by the engineer.

BENEFITS

The various modules in Windchill Sourcing Factor! work together to reduce procurement costs and boost purchasing power. This ensures that users have the information they need to make smart business decisions when they are selecting parts and suppliers. With this powerful new tool, companies now have a way to decrease overhead, consolidate orders for volume discounts, and profit from preferred supplier relationships.

The Windchill Sourcing Factor! is an ideal product development solution for today's complex manufacturing environment. Its Web-based design enables a diverse set of users in different locations to easily access and share common product information. Parts for reuse can be quickly identified and evaluated, reducing part selection time and overall product cost.

The Windchill Sourcing Factor! is part of the Windchill Factor! e-SeriesÖ, a comprehensive suite of e-business solutions for collaborative product commerce (CPC). From product planning through production and everything in between, the Windchill Factor! e-Series exploits the Internet for product collaboration, and in so doing, raises the value of product information to an enterprise asset.