If you enjoy wasting time use PTC Windchill
Rating: 1 out of 10
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 The search will usually return hundreds or thousands of results for anything and also shows historical documents in those results.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.
Likelihood to Recommend
This product is perhaps typical of something that seems as though it was conceived in the 90's and has seen various appendages since, none of which do their job particularly well. Nothing in this system is efficient and all its processes demand a huge, close to maximum possible level of human effort. No doubt many companies, such as my own are spend huge amounts of money for the debateable privilege of tripling their employees workload and making them as inefficient as possible to make the administration of the system seem more important than it actually is.
Vetted Review
4 years of experience