Hi Dan
I was going to start a discussion about PLM and PIM when I found your post from 2013. I see no one has answered it , at least publicly.
You have asked what I would call a very good question.
Can Windchill be extended so companies do not need to buy a third party software to manage their product information consolidated into a PIM software.
One can argue that Windchill is to be used for product/items (see definition below) designed/made entirely/partially by the company. Traded products Engineering is not aware of generally do not end up in Windchill but from a business point of view, it is a good that need saling and making profit. So the PIM will allow customer to find self made/design product AND the traded products of that company (The customer does not know the different between the two).
The problem is that it is again another system sharing similar information and that need integration to improve efficiency and data quality.
is there a PIM plug in in Windchill. Can Windchill which already contain a lot of information PIM will need to be extended to provide a "PIM interface" and seek the missing product (such as the traded goods I mentioned above)
What is PTC views and strategy.
Definition
Item: The technical view of a material or part, including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data
Product: The commercial view of a material or part, including sales and marketing information
So Windchill so far is to manage the Item and PIM the product. However this does not add up.
Currently PLM systems and PIM systems are complementary but as a purist PIM is part of PLM (not talking about system here)
PIM is more about consolidating existing data from different systems (PLM and ERP for instance) and provide a commercial view of it
Apart of PTC, what are your thoughts and experience. Can we have views from non Engineering people ?
There is a good paper from Tech Clarity on the matter
http://www.tech-clarity.com/documents/Complementary_Roles_of_PIM_and_PLM.pdf
Dan, 2 years after your post, there will now be more interest in the topic. PLM and PIM systems have both changed a lot
Best regards
Chris