Modernizing a Mission-Critical PLM Environment While Ensuring Business Continuity at Globe Union Industrial Corp.

Summary

Globe Union Industrial Corp., a global manufacturer of sanitary and plumbing products, needed to modernize its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment to ensure long-term platform support, maintain business continuity, and create a foundation for future digital engineering initiatives. The project involved a complex triple-generation migration, extensive legacy customizations, and strict requirements for business continuity and data integrity. Drawing on extensive experience from enterprise Windchill upgrade and migration projects, Transition Technologies PSC developed a structured modernization approach tailored to Globe Union’s environment, technical landscape, and business requirements. The team designed and executed a multi-stage upgrade strategy, including rehearsal migrations, customization modernization, and comprehensive validation. As a result, Globe Union Industrial Corp. successfully transitioned to a modern PLM platform while minimizing operational risk and disruption.

Business Challenges

Globe Union’s PLM environment has evolved over many years and included a significant number of customizations, integrations, and historical data assets supporting daily engineering operations. Upgrading the system across three major Windchill generations required balancing modernization objectives with the need to maintain uninterrupted access to critical business and product data. As a result, the project presented several key challenges:

• Upgrading a mission-critical PLM environment across three major Windchill generations
• Ensuring business continuity and data integrity throughout the migration process.
• Analyzing, updating, and validating a large volume of legacy custom-developed functionalities.
• Resolving data continuity issues caused by incomplete historical records in legacy environments.
• Managing complex user account permissions, field mappings, and system configuration changes during the transition.
• Migrating heterogeneous data across application servers, databases, image repositories, and file vault environments within a fixed project timeline.

Solutions

To ensure a secure and predictable transition to Windchill 13.0.2.5, TT PSC developed a structured upgrade strategy focused on minimizing business risk, preserving data integrity, and maintaining continuity of engineering operations throughout the migration process.

• Designed a structured multi-stage upgrade roadmap with three consecutive rehearsal rounds to reduce deployment risk before production go-live.
• Implemented a structured upgrade methodology that minimized deployment risk and ensured repeatability throughout the project.
• Established comprehensive backup, restoration, and validation procedures to safeguard critical business and engineering data.
• Performed detailed analysis and modernization of legacy customizations to ensure compatibility with Windchill 13.0.2.5.
• Performed comprehensive validation to ensure engineers could continue working without disruption after the upgrade.
• Supported User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and production cutover activities, ensuring a smooth transition to the new environment.

Main benefits and results

By combining a structured upgrade approach with comprehensive validation and risk mitigation measures, TT PSC enabled Globe Union Industrial Corp. to modernize its PLM environment while maintaining business continuity and minimizing operational disruption.

• Successfully upgraded the PLM platform from Windchill 10.2 to Windchill 13.0.2.5 within the planned timeline, without delaying ongoing engineering activities.
• Preserved critical product data, engineering documentation, and business processes throughout the migration, ensuring uninterrupted access to essential information.
• Successfully migrated and validated legacy customizations, allowing users to continue working with familiar processes and functionalities after the upgrade.
• Significant reduction of deployment risk through multiple rehearsal and validation cycles.
• Reduced technical debt and improved platform maintainability, simplifying future administration, upgrades, and system support activities.
• Established a modern PLM foundation ready for future integrations, process improvements, and digital engineering initiatives.
• Smooth production go-live without major disruption to engineering and product development operations.