CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

23 June 2009

Product News

Siemens PLM Software Launches Teamcenter 8; Driving Productivity Throughout the Product Lifecycle

Siemens PLM Software announced the latest release of Teamcenter® software.. The Teamcenter 8 release focuses on individual, application and IT productivity, with a wide variety of enhancements as well as new support for IBM software including DB2® Information Manager, WebSphere® Application Server (WAS), Tivoli® Access Manger, Tivoli Storage Manager, and Rational® ClearCase®. With Teamcenter as a single source of product and process knowledge, individuals and teams can be more productive around-the-clock and from anywhere in the world.

“We recognize that in today’s difficult business environment, our customers’ focus on productivity is stronger than ever,” said Steve Bashada, vice president of Teamcenter Applications, Siemens PLM Software. “As a result, the enhancements in Teamcenter 8 are focused on three areas – individual productivity, application productivity and IT productivity – that we believe will best help our customers meet their business objectives. And with last week’s announcement with IBM and support for their technology, along with the enhanced integration of Teamcenter 8 with Microsoft Office, we are ensuring that productivity is available in whatever environment our customers choose to implement.”

Individual Productivity

Teamcenter has always been designed to enable individuals to do more work in less time. Teamcenter 8 further extends individual productivity by enabling users to interact with Teamcenter from inside the tools and processes they use every day.

Teamcenter now includes an extensive Microsoft® Outlook® user interface as well as unmatched integration with Microsoft Office™ 2007. Teamcenter 8 adds a “ribbon” to the Microsoft Office toolbar, making it easier to interact with product information directly from within Word, Excel®, Outlook and PowerPoint®. Teamcenter 8 embeds a “Teamcenter To Do List” inside of Outlook, enabling users to manage their scheduling, workflow and engineering change assignments that are based on Teamcenter through the same office application they use every day. And by using Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel as “live” user interfaces for Teamcenter to author and edit information, it’s now easier to extend PLM access to a broad base of both technical and business users.

Whether a company produces products that include mechanical, electrical, embedded software, or a combination of all three, Teamcenter can help reduce product development cycle time by enhancing collaboration and making product design data more easily accessible, secure and reusable. The Teamcenter 8 integration with logic capture and physical layout tools from Mentor Graphics, Cadence, Intercept, and Altium is supported by embedding Teamcenter menus in these electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) solutions. From within the ECAD application, users can save native design files and perform check-in and check-out operations. They also can access approved components, populate electrical component bills-of-materials (BOMs), share fabrication and assembly data and create and manage other types of derived ECAD data files.

When implementation of embedded menus is not possible or practical, such as in the case of customer developed or other third-party tools, Teamcenter provides a new gateway integration for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. The gateway application uses a menu driven user interface and customizable configuration files to generate the same level of file access and data management functions supported with the Teamcenter embedded ECAD integrations.

Teamcenter integrates with a variety of software development tools, including a new “Ready for IBM Rational” validated ClearCase integration to tightly couple Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

Other Teamcenter 8 enhancements affecting individual productivity include workflow improvements for dynamic participants, feedback loops, and asynchronous operations along with change management and issues management.

Application Productivity

With its unified architecture and robust set of applications, Teamcenter allows companies to implement end-to-end PLM by delivering a broad and deep portfolio of integrated modules to improve efficiency at each stage of a product’s lifecycle. This application productivity continues in Teamcenter 8 with the introduction of two new application solutions, new industry solutions, as well as hundreds of enhancements across the entire portfolio. Teamcenter 8 now includes solutions for Content and Document Management as well as Formula, Package and Brand Management.

The new Content and Document Management solution with its advanced Microsoft Office 2007 integration, offers enhanced document management support for templates, embedded PLM menus and automatic rendering to standardize document processes, improve user productivity and reduce training costs. The structured authoring and publishing SGML/XML environment includes support for the independent S1000D technical publication standard to synchronize documentation and development and enable re-use, re-purposing and translation with multi-version publishing.

The introduction of Formula, Package and Brand Management in Teamcenter 8 is designed to provide several business benefits to process manufacturing organizations and companies in the consumer packaged goods industry. The new solution helps organizations eliminate inconsistent branding, improve brand communication and enable brand growth through brand knowledge management capabilities. The formula management capabilities include formula and recipe decomposition, as well as integration with formula authoring tools to consolidate information silos into a single source of information. Packaging and artwork management provides traceability through requirements and visibility to all related information to reduce errors and recalls. And finally, global specification management reduces inconsistency and re-work, enabling synchronized execution and visibility to the impact of change.

In addition to these two new solutions, Teamcenter 8 also includes enhancements to lightweight supplier collaboration, advanced requirements and project management and new industry solutions for Aerospace & Defense, CPG, and Medical Devices along with hundreds of updates across other solution areas.

IT Productivity

Teamcenter improves IT productivity by providing a greater return on a company’s IT investment. The Platform Extensibility Services in Teamcenter enable organizations to realize value from their Teamcenter investment quickly and cost effectively. These include configuration services so that Teamcenter can be easily tailored to an individual business without developing costly custom software; connection services so that Teamcenter can be seamlessly integrated with other enterprise applications (including ERP and other Teamcenter installations) to enable enterprise-wide business processes; and customization services so that Teamcenter can be extended with maintainable and upgradeable custom software to meet specialized business needs.

With its flexible four-tier, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Teamcenter can be deployed as effectively in small businesses as it can in the largest global enterprises. To facilitate this flexibility, Teamcenter supports a wide variety of IT environments, including for the first time with this latest release, IBM middleware software. As a part of a set of offerings announced by IBM and Siemens PLM Software on June 18, Teamcenter 8 is now available on the IBM technology stack and becomes the world’s first PLM solution that will ship to customers pre-configured with IBM DB2 Information Manager and WebSphere Application Server. For companies that prefer the IBM platform, Teamcenter now provides an easy to implement solution designed to reduce PLM deployment costs and boost IT productivity for any size business. In addition to DB2 and WAS, Teamcenter supports IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Access Manager, and Rational ClearCase.

“By adding support for DB2 and WebSphere, Siemens PLM Software is continuing to expand the potential customer base for its widely adopted PLM software,” said Ken Amann, Director of Research for CIMdata. “The combination of IBM’s PLM consulting and services expertise with Siemens’ PLM solutions and market presence should create strong business value for their clients.”

Teamcenter 8 also addresses IT productivity with improvements to the file management system (FMS) upload performance and more robust transaction performance for multi-site installations. These enhancements provide advanced, secure file caching to reduce file transfer time and to keep important product data synchronized throughout multiple locations.

Teamcenter 8 is available immediately. For more information, please visit www.siemens.com/teamcenter.

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