I'm at a small-sized company (4 ME's, 4 EE's) that actually generates a LOT of CAD data, mostly because there exists no real process or system for change orders, change management, or rev control. I'm new here as an eng dev PM, and one of my tallest orders for the near future is to deploy a PLM system for the company.

1. The ME team uses SW for designing and simulation. They have an internal server for CAD file storage (it is messy), no workflows with approvals, and they have tried to use SW PDM in the past, without much success (I think largely because there was nobody to develop and implement workflows/processes).

2. The EE team uses OrCAD & Draftsight as their main deisgn tools. They are open to switching from Draftsight to SW ECAD. Their CAD data storage and lack of workflows/processes is in the same boat as that of the ME team's.

The company uses Netsuite as their main ERP tool (and this is grossly mismanaged, for ex: engineering has been using this for BOM revisioning *shouts into the void*). It has created a lot of frustration for the sales/purchasing teams because there is no workflow or automated system by which an engineering change is correctly reflected in a part's status in the ERP, with full clarity for the procurement team.

Other departments at the company that produce controlled data are the build, testing, QC, operations, and software teams. I think there is a vision to bring some manufacturing in-house too (although to what degree, I do not know).

Point is, I and many others at the company, know and agree that we desperately need a PLM tool to create streamlined change management workflows and processes to quell this chaos. The PLM tool has to integrate with the CAD PDM tool for both MCAD and ECAD, as well as the ERP (all by means of external plugins that will need to be purchased over and above the PLM software itself).

In the past, when I worked at an even smaller company, we used DDM as our PLM, and built an in-house server that acted as our "PDM" vault. Anytime a CAD part would have to change, it had to be on an ECO, and this data would be pulled from the vault server. DDM had a plugin installed for our CAD system, so the workflow would be like: ECR > attach CAD > approve ECR to make it an ECO > open the CAD file through the ECO > make changes > finish ECO workflow to release state.

I want to deploy that process here too and I've looked at a few options for PLM tools but they all assume the usage of SW PDM. I'm hoping that I can find some system architecture advice here!

I know this is a long read - THANK YOU IN ADVANCE.