Three legacy systems. Six migration waves. Complete decommissioning.
A global enterprise needed to shut down three aging PLM systems and bring years of historical product data into Windchill - without losing the compliance records and audit trails their regulated business depends on.
Over the years, this organization had accumulated product data across three separate legacy PLM systems: Agile PLM, LiveLink, and Cemafore. Each system held years of engineering history - design documents, change orders, approval records, compliance data. The kind of information you absolutely cannot lose.
But maintaining three end-of-life systems was getting expensive and risky. Vendor support was ending. Integration with modern tools was becoming impossible. The organization needed to consolidate everything into Windchill 12 and shut the old systems down for good.
The catch? The legacy data was messy. Semi-structured metadata, inconsistent naming conventions, missing file representations, and complex mapping requirements between old and new data models. This wasn't a migration you could automate with a script and call it done.
Three different systems means three different ways of storing the same types of information. Field names didn't match. Data formats varied. Some records had rich metadata; others had barely anything. Normalizing all of it into a clean Windchill data model required deep understanding of each source system.
Some legacy records had no PDF or viewable representation - just raw data or proprietary format files. For compliance and traceability, the organization needed viewable documents for every migrated record. That meant generating PDFs from legacy formats during the migration itself.
Regulators and auditors need to trace any current record back to its legacy source. The migration had to create clear, queryable links between every Windchill record and its origin system - not just move the data, but document exactly where it came from.
We built a migration framework designed for messy reality - one that could handle inconsistent data, generate missing assets, and maintain an unbroken chain of traceability throughout.
Java-based utilities handled the extraction from each legacy system, dealing with their specific quirks and data structures. Talend pipelines managed the heavy metadata mapping and transformation work. Where legacy records lacked PDF representations, we used XSL transformations to generate them from the original data formats.
Rather than attempting one massive migration, we executed in six waves. Each wave targeted a specific data set, was validated independently, and fed lessons into the next. This approach controlled risk and gave stakeholders confidence at every stage.
Every record loaded into Windchill carries a link back to its source system and original identifier. Auditors can trace any document from its current Windchill location all the way back to Agile PLM, LiveLink, or Cemafore. The chain is unbroken.
We've helped organizations retire aging PLM platforms while preserving every record that matters. Let's plan your migration.
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