Working in a small to medium size business (1000-5000 employees) and looking to drag them into the 21st century by moving away from excel & word and into the world of ALM & PLM.
Our areas of interest include:
Software (20+ year support life with continuous product improvement over its life) CAD design of chassis - which typically won't change so much after initial Entry Into Service (EIS) Circuit Board (PCB) design (same as CAD, mostly static after EIS) Obviously, there are the usual, regulatory concerns, need to capture requirements, manage risk etc.
Finding potential ALM solutions is straightforward. Finding PLM solutions equally so.
Finding something that will allow control of the code stack, the CAD and the PCBs less so. An integration that auto-zips up the PCB design and version controls that way may be viable. But that's not really going to work for the CAD. So PCB could be worked around if the software and CAD lined up I think.
Various ALM tools hype their integrations, but any time I've tried integrations (more distant past and more from CAE than CAD or ALM/PLM point of view), they weren't great.
So asking for recommendations from people from the "real-world" - obviously we'd bring the tools in and validate against our needs. Unfortunately the decision makers don't realise the time & money they are literally throwing away by not making acquisition of ALM/PLM one of the highest priorities in the company - so time for the worker bees to evaluate is limited - hence wanting to avoid burning time evaluating something the maker says is great (with their canned example) - but most people who've used it know its crap in the real world!
Thanks for your time.
Should say, due to our size, things like Teamcenter are probably beyond our budget.
