Bringing innovative products to market and meeting demand fulfillment obligations are among the top priorities of most manufacturing organizations. Traditionally, product and process design were two distinct and segregated activities. With shorter product lifecycles and increased end-user customization, it is no longer feasible to have product and process efforts isolated from each other. A major PLM initiative now bridges product and process design to enable manufacturers to start process engineering efforts sooner to meet market commitments, as well as to provide design feedback about product manufacturability – with the end result of higher quality products.

Process Designer facilitates the authoring and validation of manufacturing processes from concept and detailed engineering through production planning. Process Designer enables manufacturers to develop, capture and re-use process plans. Furthermore, process design teams can compare alternatives to develop and select best manufacturing strategies that meet specific business requirements. In a 3D virtual environment, Process Designer is a collaborative platform that enables distributed enterprise teams to evaluate process plans and alternatives, optimize and estimate throughput and costs, plan for variants and changes and coordinate production resources.

PMC utilizes the Process Designer software in its Advanced Processing, Estimating and Simulation departments. Using the AutoCAD Integration feature also supplies data for a 2D and 3D system layout. Process Designer is also the precursor to Teamcenter Manufacturing’s Manufacturing Process Planner (MPP).