PTC launches product catalogue software PartsLink for mechanical and electronics suppliers

PTC has just launched its product catalogue software, Windchill Partslink, to allow mechanical and electronic suppliers to publish their rich technical product content (including 3D geometry) via the web. PTC hopes that customers of suppliers using PartsLink will be able to locate parts for their designs easier and faster than before. And PTC estimates that design engineers today spend as much as 20% of their time searching for parts and creating associated models using CAD systems. Even with this time and effort investment, engineers are still at risk of designing a part based on inaccurate technical data, or worse, that component is obsolete. Key features of PartsLink are: high-performance search capabilities that allows parametric searching, natural language searching, part number searching, or graphical tree structure navigation; a powerful statistics package that tracks catalogue activity on a client-specific basis, by part, class or attachment; and fully-integrated, advanced classification management and data engineering tools that quickly cleanse and structure product data. John Moore, vp for industry analyst ARC Advisory Group comments: “PTC is certainly expanding upon its core strengths in engineering design tools, aggressively moving into other markets for new revenue sources. The PartsLink solution goes beyond the standard e-catalogs of today providing much richer product detail, such as 3D visualisation, search capabilities, and meta-data information. Such information is largely absent today, but will greatly assist those who are moving their strategic, direct goods sourcing initiatives to the Web. “One interesting facet of this solution,” Moore adds, “is the adoption of RosettaNet as the underlying standard. PTC reports that to-date, no single standard has come to the forefront in the mechanical design arena. Rather than create one or adopt a standard that may only have limited traction in one vertical industry, PTC has chosen to go with the standard that has made the most progress, even though it is currently confined to the relatively simplistic electronics design space.” But this does beg the question: will PTC's adoption of RosettaNet drive other mechanical CAD suppliers and their users in a similar direction?