Clarity on PLM

I  had the chance to talk with … the Siemens PLM team earlier this week at their PLM Connection user’s conference. There are more announcements than I can cover here in one post, so I will concentrate on one major announcement – HD-PLM (High Definition PLM). Siemens is making a significant investment in modernizing the PLM experience with HD PLM. How will it help manufacturers get more from their PLM investment? And from a users’ perspective, can it give the PLM experience a boost to help this valuable corporate tool become a little more fun to work with?

The Announcement

To start, HD-PLM is more than just user experience. It is a new technology framework designed to unify the PLM experience across all of Siemens PLM’s products. In fact, it is planned to be the common client for all solutions. The interface is ( dare I say) cool, and looks like something anyone would be happy to work with. Think Web 2.0 meets PLM. Some examples:

• Highly graphical interface and navigation paradigm – let’s face it, this is how engineers and product developer think
• Cover flow – think iTunes-like interface to browse products)
• Role-based workspace
• Knowledge drill-down – think embedded visual reporting and business intelligence (BI)
• Proactive alerts

Bust Siemens is not just focusing on user experience. “High Definition” means more than what you see. They are are also investing heavily in a more rich definition (and validation) of products, particularly around systems engineering and mechatronics. Siemens will be making a lot more of the vast information in their systems available in an easily accessible, visual way. This is no small project for Siemens, and will provide significant value to Siemens PLM customers.

Implications for Manufacturers

What does this mean to manufacturers? To keep this short and simple:

• PLM will get more fun (and cool)
• Siemens PLM customers can feel comfortable that Siemens is still investing significantly in the future, and will enjoy the benefits of that investment over time as the new technology is released in upgrades of the products they already own
• Non-Siemens customers will have another reason to look at Siemens PLM products

So that’s what I hear from Siemens PLM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them? I expect to hear a lot more about this in the future, I look forward to sharing it here.

I had a chance to talk with… Hardeep Gulati at Oracle about the recent Agile PLM 9.3 product release. Product analytics has been, and still is for the most part, a gap in the PLM market.  So considering Oracle’s acquisitions of Hyperion and Agile in recent years, it’s not a surprise that the Oracle 9.3 PLM release is focused squarely on this area. The challenge is making this product intelligence consumable to each of the different roles along the value chain – engineering and design, manufacturing and supply chain, marketing and sales. Make the information easy to access and relevant, or you’ll have a nice analytics tool that no one uses. Oracle realizes this and has also focused the release on enhancing an already good (based on conversations over the past year with Agile users) user experience by adding “productivity tools” – for example drag and drop, inline editing, and more personalization. The company will focus their next release on leveraging their portal technology for a common user interface – a critical component of their strategy.

What do they offer?
More specifically, the product lifecycle analytics solution Oracle is offering is focused on risk management - i.e. product quality, obsolete parts, supplier’s financial liability, new sourcing options, design process, demand volatility, and where exposure is in a product portfolio. Future focus will be on deeper customer analytics during the front end of innovation, and manufacturing intelligence.

In addition to analytics, Oracle has focused on integration. We’ve heard about AIA (Application Integration Architecture) as the platform for weaving together the numerous assets Oracle has acquired, including Agile. This “backbone” (or, FUSION middleware) is an open platform that can integrate the heterogeneous environments (other PDMs, best of breeds) that are so prevalent in product development. Oracle even offers a “PIP” (process integration pack) for integrating Agile to SAP. With the 9.3 backbone you can create product development-specific services (e.g. product cost management), and have scripting available to support integration to components and segments of the product lifecycle.

How Does it Fit into the Ecosystem?
With the lack of rich product analytics in the PLM world, this is a welcome announcement. If you are looking for better product performance intelligence at all stages of the product lifecycle, Oracle’s new release warrants a look. This announcement should accelerate competitive efforts in this arena – IBM with Cognos (and it’s recently announced closer partnership with Siemens PLM), Siemens PLM, PTC, and SAP (who is working to integrate the acquired Business Objects capabilities into its product intelligence platform). I expect the next 12 months to bring rapid improvement from these and other PLM vendors, from better product portfolio analysis to product, manufacturing and supply chain analytics.

So that’s what I hear from Oracle. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

I had the chance to talk with … the team at Siemens PLM about their recent release of Teamcenter 8. Siemens released this new version of their Teamcenter PLM software concurrently with the new release of their Digital Manufacturing solution, Tecnomatix. Given time and space in a blog, I am going to focus on Teamcenter today. The theme of the Teamcenter 8 is productivity – “individual productivity, application productivity and IT productivity.” From what I can see, let’s just say that Siemens has been pretty productive themselves, and has invested heavily in this new release. Early indications are that Siemens has done a very nice job moving their PLM solution forward for their customers.

A Major Step Forward for Siemens and Teamcenter

I posted last week about the themes of several major PLM releases being announced within a week in my post What I Learned: PLM, Please Take 3 Giant Steps Forward. In that post I mentioned that PLM was expanding in three primary areas – to more people in the product development process, to a broader perspective on the product itself, and to a greater amount of the product lifecycle. In that post, I said that PLM companies have taken some large strides in technology, including service oriented architectures (SOA), analytics, and Web 2.0 capabilities. Let’s discuss Teamcenter 8 from those perspectives:

Teamcenter 8 Extending PLM to More People

Teamcenter has been developed with a broad perspective on the people involved in product innovation, product development, and engineering. With this release, Siemens is making it easier for these teams to work with the information in Teamcenter. One key enhancement in this direction it Microsoft Outlook integration. This Teamcenter release reflects the “ribbon” look and feel of newer Microsoft applications, and integrates product data management functions directly into Office and Outlook. For example, users can save Outlook messages into Teamcenter to capture and share product conversations, and can synchronize tasks between the two applications. From Office, users have live, bi-directional integration between Teamcenter and Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Some users may be able to work within Word or Excel without ever having to work directly with the Teamcenter interface, extending the ability to include non-technical users in PLM processes.

Teamcenter also has broad collaboration capabilities, including the JT file format (which Siemens has published) that allows companies to share 3D design representations without the need for the recipient to have the authoring CAD tool. With this release, Siemens adds a new “ultra-light precise” or “ULP” format that Siemens claims can share 3D graphics and related manufacturing data at about 1% of the size of the original CAD file.

Teamcenter 8 Support for a Fuller Product Definition

Siemens has also made progress in expanding the view of the product controlled within PLM. This has been accomplished though enhanced content and document management, which allows companies to include more non-engineering data in the PLM system. For the CPG industries, they have also added support for managing f

One of the most intriquing things that I see is the potential for Siemens to leverage their new relationship with IBM to better address mechatronics, or “smarter products.” In Teamcenter 8, manufacturers can now better manage application lifecycle management (ALM) data to support the embedded software that is becoming more common in todays smarter products (for more on mechatronics and IMB see my One-to-One: Big Blue’s Unprecedented Mechatronic Design Opportunity post) for more. Teamcenter 8 can now go beyond managing the software code file to managing the metadata from software development tools, specifically IBM Rational ClearCase for software configuration management. Teamcenter’s support for mechatronics also extends to electrical design automation (EDA), with embedded support within tools from Cadence, Mentor, Intercept, and Altim.

Greater Lifecycle Coverage

The team at Siemens was clearly busy. In addition to expanding support for the people and products in the product lifecycle, they have extended coverage for the product lifecycle itself. For example, Siemens has extended systems requirements and requirements management to cover the early phases of the product lifecycle. Teamcenter now offers the ability for companies to develop requirements using a template in Microsoft Word. Teamcenters content management enhancements should also provide significant opportunities to support processes and information from more phases of the product lifecycle.

Teamcenter is also reaching out to suppliers and Manufacturing. Teamcenter supplier relationship management (SRM) offers a new capability to exchange “suitcases” of information with suppliers. In addition, Siemens had integrated the manufacturing bill of process (BOP) from Tecnomatix and enhanced simulation process management with Siemens NX. Teamcenter 8 also includes new industry templates for aerosspace & defense and Softlines, Footwear,and Accessories and has updated templates for medical devices and high tech electronics.

Enhanced Teamcenter Technology

Siemens has invested heavily in their PLM architecture over the last several years. Siemens now claims to have 1,800 customers live on their unified architecture, a common four-tier, service-oriented architecture (SOA) for their Teamcenter solutions. Platform enhancements include new store and forward capabilities, faster searches, and easier solution extensibility without programming.

Siemens has also announced support for a number if IBM infrastructure solutions including DB2, Websphere and Tivoli, including a pre-configured option that includes IBM DB2 Information Manager and WebSphere Application Server (WAS).

So that’s what I hear from Siemens PLM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week…came from the joint IBM and Siemens PLM event announcing the enhanced strategic alliance between Siemens PLM, IBM Software, and IBM Global Business Services (GBS). The relationship between IBM and Siemens PLM is not new; baking in Websphere and Information Management (DB2), a.k.a. the PDIF (Product Development Integration Framework), and IBM’s SOA with Teamcenter, is. The end goal of this is enabling easier integration for IBM customers who want a PLM system and Siemens PLM customers who need a more robust infrastructure for global product development. Ultimately, I think this is a very positive step in enabling manufacturers to achieve the promise of enterprise new product development and launch (NPDL), as well as supply chain integration – to expand PLM from the engineering workgroup where product data, portfolios, and new product ideas are more rapidly accessible to the entire value chain.

What’s different about this?
Primarily, what’s different is that Siemens PLM is the first to offer full, out of the box integration with the IBM PDIF. What started as “coopetition” in 2004 between the two companies has now evolved to a comprehensive alliance agreement, where Teamcenter can be preconfigured with IBM’s middleware. Over the past couple of years, IBM has spoken extensively about PDIF, and they have forged relationships with the leading PLM vendors like Dassault Systemes, PTC, and Siemens PLM – but they did not have a packaged offering per se. Now, with the enhanced Siemens relationship, which includes business process consulting (across industry), implementation, and application hosting, they have done this. Both companies also continue to support open standards, for ease of integration with the inevitable multi-CAD and PDM environments that commonly exist with manufacturers.

A joint customer, Emerson, presented and spoke about “Teamcenter in a box,” a preconfigured global solution managed by corporate IT that can be rolled out to different divisions and partners. These divisions and partners, leveraging Teamcenter’s SOA, can subscribe to the features they want, which are then served out of corporate IT. This approach is one that could be replicated as an SMB (small/medium business) solution, or at existing enterprise customers who want to quickly roll out PLM functionality to multiple divisions across the company.

Teamcenter and Rational: A Smart Idea
A great opportunity for IBM and Siemens is the integration of Teamcenter with the Rational Software platform, which enables more efficient product development of complex, “smarter” products like cars, cell phones and planes that increasingly incorporate electrical, mechanical, and software requirements, engineering changes, and other product development data. For more on this, see: One-to-One: Big Blue’s Unprecedented Mechatronic Design Opportunity. IBM acquisitions Telelogic and Cognos also could fit into the Teamcenter arrangement. These two pieces should be (and I think they will be) lynchpins of IBM’s PLM strategy; integrated with Siemens PLM, they could provide great benefit to Teamcenter customers who may be Telelogic DOORS users, and are looking for a product planning solution (Focalpoint), as well as product analytics support. Although as far as analytics, it’s not clear how Cognos will be leveraged as part of IBM’s PDIF – but certainly, with the need for better product cost and performance analytics in the market today, the Cognos’ analytics platform could be (and I’m assuming will be) more deeply leveraged at some point.

Implications for manufacturers?
The obvious question is what does this mean to IBM’s other ISV PLM partners. The short answer is, nothing. IBM’s relationship with Centric, Dassault, PTC, MSC Software and others will remain the same; the only difference is each of these respective product lines will not, at least at this point, be preconfigured for IBM.

The challenge of unifying multiple applications, tools, and data across the product lifecycle has been alleviated with the SOAs most PLM providers now offer their solutions on; the addition of IBM’s stack to Teamcenter kicks this unification up a notch. All IBM products are certified to work with Siemens PLM products, and Siemens PLM is optimized to work with IBM middleware, or PDIF, and SOA. For manufacturers who use IBM and Teamcenter, this will enable more rapid access to the right information, better collaboration, and potentially faster time to market.

So that is what I learned this week. Let me know what you think.

What I learned this week … came from the keynote and press conference at IBM‘s Rational Software Conference (RSC2009). IBM is talking about how to help companies develop and manage today’s smarter products. What was surprising to me is that the conference is focused on developing software – not physical products – but that a lot of the conversations focused on manufacturers and product development. Are we finally getting to the point where ALM (application lifecycle management) and PLM (product lifecycle management) can be discussed in the same sentence?

A Little about “Mechatronic” Products

According to IBM’s keynote, 70% of products have embedded control systems. This means that your next refrigerator may just be “smarter” than your first PC.  OK, that really depends on how old you are, but my first PC wasn’t all that smart. The point is that a traditional mechanical product has evolved to incorporate a significant amount of software. Engineering and product development has evolved from mechanical design to a combination of mechanical and electrical design (like a “dumb” refrigerator) to mechanical, electrical, and software design in more sophisticated products (like a smart, talking refrigerator that automatically adjusts itself based on usage, season, time of day, or other factors). Another statistic quoted was that 90% of all innovation in the automotive industry is in software. While I can’t validate the percentages, the sentiment is definitely true. Many products today would not be what they are without software.

So What’s the Problem with Mechatronic Design?

There are three very distinct worlds within product development:

• Mechanical Design – The physics of the product. For the refrigerator it is the body, the handles, the shelves, the compressor (or parts of it), and other physical aspects of the product.
• Electrical Design – The electronics in the product. This can be as simple as wiring, more complex like a printed circuit board (PCB), or maybe a fully programmable chip or processor (that in turn requires software).
• Software Design-The brains of the product. This can included software algorithms that are embedded on the chips of the product, or could include programmable functions of the product. Hint – ever notice that some of your products you didn’t expect to hook up to your computer have a USB port? It might just be an indicator that your product (perhaps your tv set today, but maybe a lot of other products in the future) is set up to get software updates from the Internet.

So why is this a problem when developing products? The fact that there are three distinct design elements of a product is not the problem. The problem is that each of these design elements has it’s own lifecycle, and each impacts the other. If the mechanics, electronics, and software were unrelated then they could all be nicely designed in parallel without issues. Unfortunately, what makes today’s products “smart” is exactly what makes them hard to design and manage – the software is a key part in controlling how the product’s electrical and mechanical elements function.

Implications for Manufacturers?

The implications for manufacturers today is that product design is getting more difficult (as if it wasn’t hard enough). Processes like change and configuration management that are already hard for one discipline (mechanical, electrical, or software) need to be elevated to the systems level to encompass the whole product. Teams working on individual aspects need to collaborate earlier in the design process.

This will not happen overnight, but the companies that get this right will have a tremendous advantage in bringing high quality products to market, and avoiding late conflicts between the different disciplines that drive high product development cost and product introduction delays.  This is the future of product development, and today’s disjointed processes will not be competitive when the leading companies figure this one out.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. I will post later this week on what I hear from IBM in regards to addressing mechatronic design issues, and what their vision is for addressing ALM and PLM holistically. Let me know what you think.

NOTE:OK, this picture is not a real talking refrigerator, I admit it. This is a toy. But toys are just one more example of mechatronic products, and they will continue to get more sophisticated (incorporating physical motion, Internet connectivity, and “thinking” over time).