Coherent message, sufficient mass contribute to PLM vendor UGS' market grip
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2005 6:00:00 AM
Product life-cycle management (PLM) software today is all about packaging product information for immediate use in many business activities, especially those outside engineering and design departments.
UGS is the largest CAD/PLM vendor, and at its June press and analyst event it delivered a coherent message based on its understanding of the evolving role of PLM, and a story about its own market success and commitment to open systems.
On the one hand, PLM evolution means imposing a system solution much earlier in the "product ideation" process, so as to acknowledge and capture the marketing department's considerable responsibilities and contribution.
On the other, it means the ability to simulate on a computer the process by which a product is built, to determine manufacturing feasibility or even scheduling. This kind of capability came to UGS by way of its recently completed purchase of Tecnomatix.
UGS says it has acquired the mass needed for success in today's consolidating software industry.
"As a newly independent company," says Tony Affuso, chairman, CEO, and president, "we have $1 billion in revenues, 3.8 million seats installed, and nearly 46,000 customers."
Over the course of the two-day event, that's as close as the forward-looking UGS management team came to alluding to its somewhat convoluted recent history, which includes having been a business unit of EDS, and the acquisitions of SDRC, D-Cubed, and eBreviate.
Two good examples
Munich-based Europrop International was formed by four parent companies, including Rolls Royce, to fulfill a subcontract from Airbus Military associated with the A400M aircraft.
According to Jim Broughton, a Europrop project leader, creating an engine design within a virtual enterprise "required a visualization and modeling environment to manage an extremely complex model without a big body of designers working in a native environment."
Europrop uses UGS Teamcenter, whose latest release was announced at the New York City press event, because "it 'understands' the complex configuration management tasks at the core of what we're trying to do," says Broughton.
These configurations include functional, as-designed, could-build, should-build, as-built, and as-maintained iterations.
Broughton says the solution gave Europrop core tools to work with the four parent companies—which themselves use diverse design tools, and compete with each other as well as cooperate—while addressing security concerns; promoting reuse of intellectual property; and addressing test and validation, document management, and design approvals.
Dennis Schwartz, director, engineering services, Wright Medical Technologies, Arlington, Tenn., presented a timely case study on medical-device innovation, supported by UGS Teamcenter and UGS NX, from initial concept through the actual demonstration videos for surgeons reconstructing large joints.
According to Schwartz, Wright's "Micronail" design to repair broken wrists includes innovations relevant to both surgeon and patient. The project, from concept to completion, was accomplished in as little as half the time of similar projects and placed all data in a single, accessible location.
Areas of strength
UGS' revenue associated with cPDM, an acronym roughly equivalent to PLM, grew 35 percent in 2004, amidst total growth of 14 percent. "We have two million PLM seats worldwide, and twice as much related revenue as our closest competitor," says Affuso.
Reasons, says Boston-based analyst firm CIMdata, include UGS having the lead in automotive, aerospace, and machinery industries. UGS itself says that among companies with more than 1,000 PLM seats, 90 percent use Teamcenter.
Teamcenter 2005, says UGS Executive VP Chuck Grindstaff, integrates idea management and requirements planning with digital product development, manufacturing, and life-cycle management in a single software portfolio "suitable for 10,000-user implementations." The addition of a business logic layer and improved file management services further its scalability and flexibility.
UGS sees Teamcenter 2005 deployment being driven by new product introduction, globalization, and regulatory compliance, in use with competitors' design tools or UGS' own NX, Solid Edge, and Tecnomatix platforms.
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