Upgrading a PLM system
Pierre Bel - Project Manager at Percall Group
For companies, PLM systems are the backbone of engineering processes. That’s why keeping them up to date is a critical step to maintain security, performance, and tool compatibility. To better understand the key steps and the real impact of upgrading a PLM system, we spoke with Pierre Bel, Project Manager at Percall Group, who recently led a Windchill upgrade for one of our clients. He walks us through the context, the challenges, and the best practices that ensured a smooth and secure transition.
Pierre, could you walk us through the context of this upgrade?
We recently completed an upgrade project for a client in the medical industry whom we’ve been supporting since 2022.
The client wanted to move from Windchill 12.0.2 to 13.0.2 for two main reasons.
First, the version they were using was no longer supported by PTC. Without active support, there are no more security patches or editor assistance, which quickly becomes a risk for such a critical system.
The second reason was the need to ensure compatibility between their PLM system and their CAD tool, Creo, which is tightly integrated with Windchill. Their current Windchill version prevented them from upgrading Creo to a more recent release. The main objective was therefore to secure full compatibility between both systems and take advantage of the latest capabilities.
Could you tell us what the project involved and what the main steps were?
Before launching the upgrade, we began by analyzing the structure of the existing system and identifying sensitive elements that could be impacted.
In some situations, when upgrading across several versions, intermediate upgrades are required. But that wasn’t the case here. Even for a “simple” upgrade, this preparatory step is crucial as it allows us to understand how customizations, data and technical dependencies will react to the version change.
Once the technical framework was defined, the project was structured around two main components:
- Code upgrade: the developers migrate existing customizations to the new version
- Data upgrade: This is a key step as an editor tool is used to transform the database. And this is often when errors occur.
To ensure a smooth transition to production, we carried out three full dry runs on cloned environments:
The first run revealed errors that we corrected, the second was almost flawless, and the third confirmed that the entire procedure was fully mastered and repeatable.
These dry runs allowed us to make the procedure more reliable and to anticipate and fix any potential bottlenecks.
How did the production deployment go?
It went very smoothly.
Thanks to the thorough preparations and the dry runs, the system shutdown was fully controlled and limited to less than one day, with no incident.
We started the operation in the evening and completed it the next day, exactly within the timeframe predicted during the last dry run.
The client could choose between performing the upgrade during the week or over the weekend. Since the shutdown was estimated at under one day, they opted to proceed during the week, accepting a short window of PLM unavailability.
There was no significant impact: users were able to access their system the next day, fully operational.