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?