PLM software cuts costs

Teamcenter 2007 significantly lowers the total cost of ownership for PLM technology and establishes greater productivity for manufacturers.

Siemens PLM Software has released Teamcenter 2007, the latest version of its PLM software.

Boasting a complete service-oriented architecture (SOA), easy to use interface and an end-to-end PLM solution set, Teamcenter 2007 significantly lowers the total cost of ownership for PLM technology and establishes greater productivity for manufacturers through a single source of product and process knowledge.

"Teamcenter 2007 marks a new era of PLM market maturity with the industry's first solution to move beyond individual software applications to establish a truly integrated PLM solution across disciplines, project phases and programs based upon SOA approaches", said Michel Vrinat, Collaborative Product Development Associates analyst.

Teamcenter 2007 was developed with a focus on lowering the total cost of PLM ownership through a series of enhancements and features that simplify and accelerate implementations, enhance productivity, streamline collaboration and expand control of the entire product lifecycle process.

Teamcenter's Business Modeler Integrated Development Environment (BMIDE) enables software configuration and customisation along with rapid deployment of changes to remote sites through implementation templates and live server synchronisation.

In addition, Teamcenter 2007 includes a complete SOA technology foundation throughout the entire portfolio, delivering the industry's first fully unified PLM suite.

Teamcenter 2007 allows companies to eliminate costly implementations and significantly reduce the time necessary to deploy a production-ready system.

"SOA-based PLM reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining a distributed PLM environment", says Ed Miller, President of CIMdata.

"Siemens PLM Software has delivered their new unified architecture capability with the ability to co-exist and interoperate with current Teamcenter implementations".

"This means that the upgrade path for existing Teamcenter customers can be much more cost-effective".

Siemens PLM Software customers have been using Teamcenter 2007 in a production environment for the past several months as part of the company's Leadership Program.

This program has served to validate how the complete SOA implementation simplifies several tasks for customers.

In one example, Teamcenter's unified database enabled a customer to perform its upgrade all at once, rather than through individual steps and synchronisation of several components.

The single data model also makes it much easier to perform tasks like data mining and connecting to ERP systems.

The end result is significant savings in time and development resources.

In addition to being easy to deploy, Teamcenter 2007 also establishes a lower cost of ownership through an easy to use interface.

A new common look and feel based on the Microsoft user interface simplifies user adoption and reduces training costs.

"I believe 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", said Matt Bronowski, Project Manager of Next Generation PLM for BSH.

"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".

By providing a single source of product and process knowledge along with the ability to enable instant collaboration on a global basis, Teamcenter 2007 delivers greater productivity and teamwork.

As a result, companies have more time to focus on developing innovative solutions that create real business value.

"BSH needs to distribute data to nearly 40 different R and D departments around the world and keep everybody in these departments consistently updated with the latest product information", said Uwe Tontsch, Head of IT for Product Development and Industrial Engineering Solutions, BSH.

"That is where Teamcenter 2007, as the single source for this information, is more or less the backbone and the relay station; so everybody gets the information when needed in the process".

"That brings us not only the benefit of time to market, but also a much higher process security and therefore less failures in the design process due to lack of updates or wrong version information".

By unifying all product-related data, Teamcenter 2007 creates fast, easy access to just the right information regardless of the end user's location or job responsibility.

This information can then be effectively leveraged with new process knowledge enhancements for embedded requirements management, providing the ability to allocate requirements to mechanical, electrical, electronics and software systems to more effectively manage the impact of change.

Teamcenter 2007 also simplifies bill-of-material (BOM) management with new tools to visualise and browse complex product relationships, aligning design BOMs with business BOMs and enabling BOM editing and redlining.

In addition, the Teamcenter 2007 Leadership Program highlighted how customers can save significant amounts of time in activities such as design reviews by using Teamcenter as a single source of knowledge and collaboration.

For example, one customer discovered that when they needed to collaborate on a product development project with other locations, it could gather and share all of the information necessary, including all of the 3D models, in a single afternoon, a process that used to take three to four weeks.

As a result, designers and engineers can spend less time on paperwork and are free to do more creative design work.

Teamcenter 2007 provides companies with greater control by allowing them to connect all of their processes into a cohesive system that enhances efficiency and improves management visibility throughout the product lifecycle.

Manufacturers of all sizes can increase the speed and confidence of management decision making by aligning new product and service introduction efforts with market requirements.

Tight software integration eliminates the need to re-enter data from one process to the next and Teamcenter's scalability and breadth of modular applications enables small to medium size manufacturers to deploy a cost-effective system that can be easily expanded as the business grows.

The enhanced visibility afforded by Teamcenter 2007 can positively affect both top-line and bottom-line business value.

Revenue potential is increased by validating ideas against market opportunities, producing products that are better aligned with market needs and delivering them on time before the competition.

At the same time, operating and process costs are reduced through a more efficient and co-ordinated effort among various departments and greater flexibility built into the product development network".

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