Data migration is one of many types of projects we take on at Fishbowl Solutions. As a 20+ year partner with PTC, our team brings expertise, knowledge, proven proprietary applications, and other intellectual property to each of our projects – setting us apart from other PTC partners. 

In a recent project, our customer, a global manufacturer and distributor of consumer and commercial products, was migrating data and processes from each of its subsidiaries into PTC Windchill. Many of these subsidiaries had been acquired over time and had disparate CAD systems, PDM platforms, ECO processes, ERP systems, and more. This manufacturer understood the benefits of having a global PLM strategy and how Windchill allows them to execute it. In this vein, they required successful, timely consolidation of data into Windchill and partnering with Fishbowl was the best way to accomplish this.

Every one of their migrations has been different, but every migration followed a similar process. There have been migrations with Solidworks, Creo, AutoCAD, and various documents that reside in sources like ProductCenter, PDMWorks, ePDM and on their file system.

The data migration processes involved some type of data extraction either from the source PDM/PLM or copying file folder data onto a staging server. If the data was extracted from a source PDM/PLM then Fishbowl also extracted metadata so it could be evaluated and transformed for use in Windchill if the customer desired. Additional transform steps and pre-migration validation were executed along with test migrations and post migration validations. In some cases, historical revisions were migrated, but in others only the latest versions were migrated. Cost, project timeline, risk, and compliance are usually the key determining factors in migration of legacy data. 

Once the final test migration is validated and confirmed, the team executed the production migration. Production migrations usually occur over a weekend so they don’t disrupt the normal business hour workload of the engineering team. Fishbowl has used several proprietary applications in these projects – extraction tools from ePDM, ProductCenter, PDMWorks, Fishbowl Loaders and Linking Tools for CAD, documents and WTParts, and we have used PTC tools when appropriate.

This customer has several more migrations ahead to get their remaining subsidiaries into Windchill, and Fishbowl Solutions is ready and able assist them with accomplishing their goals of achieving a global PLM strategy. If you’re interested in the specifics of this story, and how Fishbowl can assist you with a data migration to Windchill, please contact us using the form at the bottom of this page or [email protected].