Multiple CAD systems. One unified PLM backbone. Zero broken links.
An automotive engineering company had CAD data scattered across Teamcenter, Chinook, and multiple file formats. We brought it all together into Windchill 13 without losing a single engineering relationship.
When an automotive engineering company grows through acquisitions and evolving tool choices, you end up with engineering data in multiple systems. This client had CREO files in Teamcenter, CATIA models in Chinook, and engineering BOMs spread across both. Different schemas, different lifecycle states, different ways of doing things.
The goal was clear: bring everything into Windchill 13 as the single PLM backbone. But "everything" included deep CAD assemblies with hundreds of nested dependencies. An automotive part isn't just a file - it's a node in a massive tree of assemblies, sub-assemblies, and bill-of-materials that all have to stay connected.
Teamcenter and Chinook store data in fundamentally different ways. Field names don't match. Lifecycle states don't align. Object types have different definitions. You can't just copy files over - you have to translate everything into Windchill's data model while preserving the original meaning.
CAD assemblies in automotive engineering can run dozens of levels deep. Parent-child relationships, EBOM structures, SBOM configurations - break one link in the chain and an engineer can't find their parts anymore. Every relationship had to survive the migration intact.
CREO and CATIA files behave differently. They have different reference mechanisms, different version tracking, and different ways of linking to their parent assemblies. Both needed to land cleanly in Windchill with their native associations preserved.
We built a migration pipeline that could handle the complexity of multiple source systems while guaranteeing structure integrity on the other side.
Each source system got its own extraction approach. We used WBMFF (Windchill Bulk Migration Framework) and raw extraction frameworks tailored to each system's quirks. CAD files from Teamcenter were staged on network storage before ingestion to handle the volume safely.
Talend pipelines handled the heavy lifting of mapping source schemas to Windchill's data model. Custom utilities managed lifecycle state reassignment and container mapping - making sure every object landed in the right context with the right status.
Automated validation scripts checked every structure relationship after migration. Manual spot-checks by engineering teams confirmed that real-world assemblies opened correctly in Windchill. If a CREO assembly had 200 child components in Teamcenter, it had to have exactly 200 in Windchill.
We've merged complex CAD environments without losing a single link. Let's talk about your consolidation.
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