Industry Summary Articles

Cost estimators and other decision makers need accurate information for decision-making and they need this information earlier than ever. To address these needs we continuously improve our solution for Product Cost Management. The new version 8.2 provides enhanced capabilities which supports manufacturers to increase visibility of cost drivers in the early stages of product development, helping them to avoid costly engineering rework downstream before the start of production. 

Optimized calculation process by updating existing work plans in Teamcenter Product Cost Management
To avoid a manually executed synchronization by cost engineers, which is very time consuming and error prone, the new version provides a new capability to update BOMs (bill of materials), BOPs (work plans) and BOEs (plant resources such as tools and machines) within Teamcenter Product Cost Management (TcPCM) at a glance. These synchronization activities can be automated and cost engineers can focus on value adding activities as calculation, controlling, and analysis of cost drivers.

Improved calculation efficiency through automations in Excel or web service import
The new version provides several enhancements to increase automation during the data import stage which consequently results in efficiency improvements for cost engineers. 

Possibility to save calculation results as master data material
Cost calculation can now be saved or “published” as a master data material; and therefore, improve the calculation re-use and automation. 

Increased flexibility of calculation engine to support further use cases
OEM’s and suppliers demand more precise and transparent costing to be better prepared for negotiations with customers or suppliers and have a better understanding of underlying cost drivers. As a result, the new version 8.2 includes additional direct material cost types to support a more specific calculation and roll-up of product or commodity costs. 

Increased consistency with the improved validation framework
Validation is an important part of TcPCM to ensure consistency and avoid errors by showing corresponding warning or an error message. With the improvement of this capability, hard-coded validation was replaced with the possibility to generate custom specific validations. 

Custom terminology for more consistency within calculations
Possibility to re-name fields to reflect custom terminology by generating a company or even department specific terminology as a parallel structure to the TcPCM terminology. 

Consistent and reliable tool cost estimates through advanced feature recognition with NX Feature2Cost
The new module NX Feature2Cost supports OEMs, suppliers and tool makers in the tool costing process. It recognizes important geometrical information like general part dimensions, ribs, undercuts, bends, etc. and drives them into actual cost drivers. In case of analysis, TcPCM can start NX, pass a geometry file and wait for the result after further interaction of the user with NX. NX provides two feature recognition modules, NX Feature2Cost Molding and NX Feature2Cost Stamping. These modules are able to automatically analyze the geometry file, provide capabilities to manually modify the feature recognition and corresponding cost drivers and then pass them back to TcPCM. Within, there are a crucial input into the actual tool cost calculation which is carried out based on existing capabilities within TcPCM.

To view the original press release, please click here.

Search for Teamcenter on CIMdata.com