Hello,
I am interested in identifying other users out there who are using Jira across multi-disciplinary engineering teams e.g. Software, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronic etc. Such teams may be developing electro-mechanical systems/products and use a PDM system for their configuration management and release of change orders to manufacturing. It is likely they maintain software repositories for the development of the software and simply have releases stored as PDM objects (parts). This is the reality of where we are today and the PDM system we have chosen is PDM-Pro of Dassault systems, primarily because it is biased/integrated to the Solidworks CAD tool in use by our mechanical engineers. Problems I have with PDMPro are the change management aspects, by which I mean enterprise change management via change requests (CRs) and change orders (COs). As a task management platform PDMPro falls short. It falls short in other areas too but that is out of context on this forum!
We use Jira increasingly for all task management in the company so it seems reasonable to implement the change management aspects of Product Development in Jira and leave PDM-Pro to the configuration management i.e. clearly identifed, named, numbered rev'd engineering BOMs that deliver a baseline of information to manufacturing upon release of a CO. Jira can handle the workflow associated with raising, planning and closing of CR's and the subsequent release of the CO. All we need is to build links to the underlying objects/artifacts in the PDM system that were changed for that CR.
The requirements are quite simple and the integration points between the two systems could mimic those used by the Jira SVN plugins and other similar repository plugins.
Unfortunately, PDM-Pro does not present a very user friendly API and the development cost with a VAR of solidworks is prohibitively expensive. Does anyone else out there see a need for such integrations, if so I would be very interested to discuss with them.
Thanks
Jamie
