Posts Tagged ‘PDM’
Teamcenter at PLM Europe
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Eduard Marfa is Director EMEA Marketing – Teamcenter. I spoke with him this week about Teamcenter 8.3 momentum.
In our video interview, he discusses how customers are adopting 8.3, and how High Definition PLM is transforming decision making.
Jerry
How smaller manufacturing companies are taking control of their product data – Part 3: How to reap the benefits quickly
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
by guest blogger David Chadwick
In my first and second posts in this series I discussed the findings of a new whitepaper from Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity “The business benefits of product data management: Achieving rapid and extendable benefits” and focused on the themes that Jim identified as having a significant impact on the manufacturers that he interviewed: getting control of product data, speeding retrieval of the correct data, and improving collaboration.
This final post focuses on how these benefits can be obtained quickly, and how they can be extended across the organization.
Jim recommends that manufacturers look for solutions that provide best practices in the form of a preconfigured environment and found that Teamcenter Express, the PDM solution selected by the three companies he interviewed, follows these best practices as described in these quotes:
How smaller manufacturing companies are taking control of their product data – Part 2: Easier access and improved collaboration
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
from guest blogger David Chadwick
In last week’s post in this series I discussed the findings of a new whitepaper from Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity “The business benefits of product data management: Achieving rapid and extendable benefits” and focused on the first of three themes that Jim identified as having a significant impact on the manufacturing organizations that he interviewed – getting control of product data.
This post focuses on the second and third themes of the whitepaper: improving the ability to quickly find and reuse data, and then sharing this product knowledge to improve collaboration. All of the companies that Jim interviewed found that improving their ability to find the correct data quickly, and improving their reuse of proven components in new designs had a significant impact on their business. Here are a few quotes from these companies that describe the problems they faced and the benefits they are achieving:
How smaller manufacturing companies are taking control of their product data – Part 1: Getting control of product data
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
I’m turning over the blog this week to my colleague Dave Chadwick (follow Dave on twitter @davidchadwick) who is launching a three-part series about taking control of product data. Dave works for Siemens PLM Software and is responsible for global product marketing for Teamcenter Express.
Part 1: Getting control of product data
Many small to mid-size manufacturing companies struggle with managing product data efficiently and effectively. Their designers can spend a significant proportion of their time just searching for the data they need, and in the manufacturing process errors often occur because the correct product data is not being used. A new whitepaper from 
Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity shows how companies that experienced these and other problems have implemented Product Data Management (PDM) software to quickly get control of their data.
As a result of his research Jim identified 3 key themes where the companies he interviewed have successfully applied PDM to achieve significant benefits:
- Controlling and securing product data
- Improving the ability to quickly find and reuse data
- Sharing product knowledge with other departments
In this first of a 3 post series we will focus on the first and most fundamental of these three themes – getting control of product data. All of the companies that Jim interviewed saw improving control and security of product data as a key reason for implementing PDM. Here are a few quotes from these customers that describe the problems they faced and the benefits they are achieving:
Wright Medical Video: Changing the Game in the Orthopedic Industry with Teamcenter
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
This is a post by my colleague, Michael Breiy:
We do many cool things with our software but sometimes something stands out to me and I wanted to share one of those examples with you. We have just finished making a new video case study with a company called Wright Medical Technology, Inc. The video shows how Siemens PLM Software helped them create knee replacements that patients can adapt to faster than ever before and with much less pain involved. This is a great example of how the medical profession and technologists together can make some very significant steps forward. Both doctors and patients are very excited about this new approach to joint replacement called Prophecy® – watch the video and I think you will agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSOxhZOVZ-UMercury Marine transforms their global product development process
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Over the past few months I have been involved in a project with a Teamcenter customer – Mercury Marine. The project was to capture and document their product development process after the deployment of Teamcenter on the unified architecture. The results of the project are a case study and videos.
Mercury Marine is the world’s leading manufacturer of recreational marine propulsion engines. A $1.5 billion division of Brunswick Corporation, Mercury provides engines, boats, services and parts for recreational, commercial and government marine applications.
The goal of implementing PLM was to strengthen their ability to launch new products – better products, and more products faster with fewer resources. They had gone from two engineering sites in USA to six engineering site globally. Their product development process was already complex, even before adding new engineering sites.
Before the implementation the product development process had many manual steps, many different sources of data, and many BOMs that had to be manually reconciled!
“Before the Business Process Transformation the Product design data and project data was stored and managed in multiple systems which lead to longer lead times in our Product Development process” explains Balakrishna Shetty, Technical Lead for CAD, CAM and PLM Systems at Mercury. “With the defined release processes in Teamcenter to capture the development/milestone specific design builds, ensured all stakeholders in the Product Development Process used the same set of information to make the right decisions.”
“In the past the company had multiple systems/places where people could take out part numbers. Engineering Bill of Material was maintained in spreadsheets by all the stakeholders involved with Product Development. The Engineering change process used multiple systems and it was not automated. All this resulted in extended lead time in the design and development phase and didn’t help the downstream users,” says Shetty. CAD data was managed in a PDM environment, preventing the company from leveraging it in cross-functional collaborations.
A key element of the company-wide Teamcenter implementation is the use of a single repository for all product information. This includes Pro/ENGINEER CAD data, design specifications, design standards, material specifications, supplier data, supplier specifications and any other dataset types relevant to the product data. It also includes 600,000 items of legacy product data that were migrated into the Teamcenter database from their previous system. Mercury Marine’s sites are synchronized allowing a level of global design collaboration.
You can read the complete transcript at http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/success/case_study.cfm?ComponentTemplate=1481&Component=104449
and also watch videos at
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/Images/flvplayer_tcm1023-23557.swf
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/Images/flvplayer_tcm1023-23557.swf
Carl Fink of Lockheed Martin at PLM Connection
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Last week I met Carl Fink, senior manager of PDM Tools for Lockheed Martin‘s Airframe and Installation Design group. Carl attended my Social Media in PLM presentation because he is interested in leveraging social communication tools to expand their design capability. They’ve used live meetings, experimented with wikis and leverage some of the built-in capabilities of Teamcenter. Continue reading “Carl Fink of Lockheed Martin at PLM Connection” »
Steve Bashada talks about PDM to PLM transition
Friday, June 4th, 2010
During my recent visit to the Siemens PLM Software facility in Milford, Ohio I had an opportunity to sit down with Steve Bashada, VP, Teamcenter Product Development. (Steve has an insanely busy travel schedule so I was lucky to find him in his office). We talked about customer transitions to PLM from PDM, PLM opportunities for customers, and HD-PLM, our recent announcement at the World fair in Shanghai. Steve had some valuable insights. I’ll be sharing more of his views in upcoming blog entries.
Improve productivity of product development processes using corporate social networking
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
In the last blog we discussed corporate Social Networking in a product development environment. We wanted to talk to customers who have implemented a corporate social networking to enable their product development collaboration, and learn about their experiences. Here is an example of a customer – Northrop Grumman who has implemented Social networking in their product engineering. Jim Ayers, Systems Engineer, Northrop Grumman, has been involved with the project from early concept days to implementation and now supporting it. Jim is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He also leads the Teamcenter Community Collaboration Special Interest Group of the PLM World. He is based in Huntsville Alabama, USA. Here is the excerpt from my interview with Jim:
Question:
What was Northrop’s product development environment before you implemented corporate Social Networking?
Answer:
Most of our product engineering work is large contracts for the US Air force and Navy. These projects involve large teams, including partners, in different geographic locations; we were no different than most other companies. We relied mostly on e-mails, Microsoft Office Outlook, to communicate ideas, issues, input, etc. Most of our meetings were teleconferences. When the Navy had even a simple question it required the Navy to write a formal letter asking for clarification. And vice-a versa, when we had a question about an RFP or the contract we would follow the same process. This whole process often took weeks.
Our e-mail exchanges were becoming difficult to save and trace due to storage size limitations. Meeting notes were hand written in a notebook and eventually transcribed to e-mail.
Then in 2004 we were bidding jointly with Lockheed on a US Air force project. The Lockheed facility was in Northern California and our team was 300 miles away in Southern California. The Air force’s question to us was: could we be as productive with teams in 2 different locations versus our competitor in a single location? Suddenly we were forced to look at technology to help us overcome barriers of our project teams in 2 locations. The word Social Networking, as we know now, was not even coined at this time.
Question:
What did you do to break down the barrier of project teams in multiple locations?
Answer:
We had to find a solution in hurry. We studied available technology and tools. We evaluted Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint (by itself) and Teamcenter Community Collaboration developed on Microsoft SharePoint. After extensive evaluation we felt that Teamcenter Community Collaboration offered most of the functionality we needed out-of-the-box and also it was based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform which were very familiar with. We felt Teamcenter Community Collaboration offered us simple Web parts customization to make it the way we felt our people would like to see the home page and able to navigate to right information easily and quickly.
Question: What were the biggest initial challenges?
Answer:
We had no product issues. However, the biggest early challenges were all around security – firewall, access control of information. We started the project with 3 engineering work stations in a DMZ (demilitarized zone is a physical or logical sub network that contains and exposes an organization’s external services to a larger untrusted network, usually the Internet). We continued to work with the vendor development team to resolve security issues. You have to recognize that these projects are top security projects!
I can happily say now looking back that we started with “creative chaos”, not knowing where and how this tool will evolve. We started with information sharing which was one of the main objectives of this tool. We were learning different new uses every day. For example, the VP of Engineering started using the tool for managing his staff meetings. He was able to track issues and actions from each meeting, he could trace who the attendees were for each meeting, what actions are completed. We started using visual collaboration capabilities of Teamcenter Appshare (Application Sharing). We can now review designs and drawing, do mark-ups where all the participants are on teleconference and are also viewing the same design on their PC. It allowed different people to take control and give their input. Our management realized, after some coaching by us, that they can use it for any application, like PowerPoint, Word, PDF, Excel, etc. The executives working on a presentation, proposal or financial spread working collaboratively with large team are now able to use the tool’s notification capabilities whenever the latest document is checked in. This is especially important for executives traveling to make a presentation to corporate headquarters, or the Navy and Air force on a proposal they are able to access and synchronize to have the latest document.
We saw its usage growing beyond engineering. We saw the executives, non-engineers and the contracting agencies adopting and using the tool in their daily work. We have grown from 3 seats, to 10,000 users and 4 major deployments over the past 3 years.
Most users can start using the tools after only 1 hour of training. The beauty of this tool is it is so familiar and easy to use.
Question: How has your engineering process evolved with Social Networking?
Answer:
We have now organized information by product and contracts. We have created WBS – work break down – by contract. We have made easy to navigate and find the right information quickly. The information is secure, firewalled to only authorized users.
We have also created visual navigational models using JT (Siemens PLM Software’s high-performance, compact visualization format). So users can now visually navigate to the right context quickly. For casual users this is very productive since they always may not know the contract number.
We have eliminated off-line storage. All meeting notes along with issue list are stored in the system. It has also made it easy to educate users about the workflow.
We have been able to reduce and in some cases eliminate travel. Payback for the tool is “one-day”!
Question: What else?
Answer:
Ad-hoc meeting/collaboration with US Navy and Airforce has become part of our formal process. What used to take 3 weeks to resolve simple questions now we can resolve them in a few minutes. We all get on the phone and Appshare. There is no ambiguity since we all can see the same document. And we capture the outcome of the meeting in the system.
Social Networking is integral part of our engineering release/change workflow. It has to be. It must be integrated with product data management/PLM. Our engineers continue to create CAD designs, save it in their work-in-process PDM repository (Teamcenter), and when they are ready to “release” the workflow automatically transfers it into the social networking space to send notifications for the review process.
Question: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking of social networking in their product engineering environment?
Answer:
- Get your users involved early
- Get the right stake holder involved
- Understand user workflows and show them how this would enhance it
Innovation Leadership Summit
Monday, March 15th, 2010
I’m attending our Innovation Leadership Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, today and tomorrow. Attendees are executives from some of our enterprise customers. They’re here to hear and share best practices on PLM implementations and achieving product success in today’s economy.
They represent nearly every industry we support. I’m interviewing some of the speakers and attendees and will share more with you shortly. The event’s signage notes “new rules, tough questions, straight answers.” So if you have questions you’d like me to get answers to, just leave a comment.
Dora
