The next step in PLM: Siemens showcases the latest version of its Teamcenter collaboration suite
Sidney Hill, Jr., executive editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/4/2007 3:34:00 AM MDT
Siemens PLM Software claims its Teamcenter 2007 product life-cycle management (PLM) suite will significantly lower the cost of owning PLM technology while also making teams that use it far more productive.
Siemens is so excited about Teamcenter 2007 that it chose to make its unveiling the centerpiece of the annual Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) conference that took place in Orlando in early October.
By hosting the conference’s main dinner event, Siemens assured itself of having a large group of product development professionals—all potential customers—on hand for its Teamcenter 2007 announcement.
The program opened with a professional comedy troupe satirizing the business problems that Siemens says Teamcenter 2007 can solve. Among them:
• Having product-related information essentially locked inside the brains of a few long-term employees who may or may not be willing or able to share that information with colleagues;
• A lack of tools for clear communication among members of globally dispersed product development teams; and
• Users who constantly want systems customized for their own purposes.
Siemens executives contend the first two issues were largely addressed in previous versions of Teamcenter, which offered a central repository for all of a company’s product-related data, along with capabilities for multiple team members to view data at the same time.
Primarily through a series of acquisitions, Siemens also assembled a set applications that addresses all facets of product development, from designing products to managing the machines that build them.
The primary focus of Teamcenter 2007, according to Siemens officials, was lowering total cost of ownership by making the system both easier to install and to use.
New Teamcenter 2007 features include:
• A service-oriented architecture that makes it easier to incorporate various pieces of the Teamcenter product set—as well as components from other applications—into new business processes;
• A rich user interface that offers the same viewing and navigational experience that users get in familiar Microsoft Office applications;
• A new data model that can support activities not traditionally associated with PLM, such as the management of production processes and supplier relationship management; and
• A new business modeler.
Jim Phelan, a Siemens PLM Software spokesman, says the business modeler is the piece that does the most to boost productivity. It allows teams of workers—even if they are spread around the globe—to collaborate on how business processes will work within the Teamcenter environment. Once a process has been created, it can be tested inside the business modeler. If the test is successful, the process can be activated with the push of a button, Phelan says.
During the PDMA launch event, Siemens executives aired video testimonials from customers who adopted Teamcenter 2007 several months ahead of its release. One of those customers was Matt Bronowski, project manager of Next Generation PLM at BSH, a German consumer products manufacturer that started as a joint venture between Bosch and Siemens.
“We will be able to lower our total cost of ownership by reducing training costs simply because of the familiar Windows-like user interface of Teamcenter 2007,” Bronowski said. “This will particularly help in regions like Asia where we’re growing very rapidly and employing many new people. It’s critical to bring these people up to speed very quickly, and we believe the latest version of Teamcenter will allow us to do that.”
Siemens officials believe Teamcenter 2007 also will expand the company’s already substantial lead in the PLM software market.
