Teamcenter 2007 Marks 'New Era' in PLM Market

"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. "The rich capabilities in Teamcenter 2007 bode well for its continued industry leadership in the PLM marketplace."

Greater Manageability

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.

One of the most powerful examples of this lower cost of ownership is found in Teamcenter's new Business Modeler Integrated Development Environment (BMIDE). The BMIDE enables software configuration versus customization along with rapid deployment of changes to remote sites through implementation templates and live server synchronization. In addition, Teamcenter 2007 includes a complete SOA technology foundation throughout the entire portfolio, delivering the industry's first fully unified PLM suite. The greater manageability enabled through Teamcenter 2007 sets a new standard for an easy- to-configure PLM environment, enabling 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 industry consulting and research firm CIMdata. "Siemens PLM Software has delivered their new unified architecture capability with the ability to coexist and interoperate with current Teamcenter implementations. This means that the upgrade path for existing Teamcenter customers can be much more cost- effective."

A select group of 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 synchronization 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 a 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."

Greater Productivity and Teamwork

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&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 visualize 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 leadership customer discovered that when they needed to collaborate on a product development project with other locations, they 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.

Greater Control

With the industry's most comprehensive suite of powerful end-to-end PLM applications and an unparalleled level of integration among them, 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 even 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 coordinated effort among various departments and greater flexibility built into the product development network.

"Siemens PLM Software appears to be ahead of its competitors in driving product data management functions across the board in product development projects," said Dick Slansky, ARC Advisory Group. "Their broad scope of solutions is impressive but it's the integration of those end-to-end offerings that creates real value for manufacturers."

Greater Success

Any major enterprise application, such as PLM, can have a profound impact on the company that selects it and deploys it. An unproven system or proprietary niche supplier can put an organization at risk. As the clear market leader, Teamcenter has an unchallenged record of proven global leadership.

In addition to being recognized with several industry awards over the past two years, Teamcenter and Siemens PLM Software have earned the trust and loyalty of the global manufacturing community. The company's top 100 customers have been clients for an average of 17 years, and the three million installed licenses of Teamcenter represent more than seven times the install base of the next closest competitor. In fact, more companies trust Teamcenter to manage their product knowledge than the next three competitors combined.

"By listening to the market and understanding the challenges of the global manufacturing community, our development team has been able to produce the world's most advanced and complete PLM offering that is both easy-to-deploy and use," said Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president of Products, Siemens PLM Software. "As a result, our customers can spend less time on non- productive tasks and more time on producing the world's most innovative new products."

Teamcenter 2007 is available immediately. For more information please visit www.ugs.com/teamcenter2007.

About Siemens PLM Software

Siemens PLM Software, a division of Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D), is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with 4.3 million licensed seats and 47,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software's open enterprise solutions enable a world where organizations and their partners collaborate through global innovation networks to deliver world-class products and services. For more information on Siemens PLM Software products and services, visit www.siemens.com/ugs.

About Siemens Automation and Drives

The Siemens Automation and Drives Group (A&D), Nuremberg, Germany, is the leading manufacturer in this field worldwide. Products supplied by A&D include standard products for the manufacturing and process industries and for the electrical installation industry as well as system solutions, for example for machine tools, and solutions for whole industries such as the automation of entire automobile factories or chemical plants. Supplementing this range of products and services, A&D also offers software for linking production and management (horizontal and vertical IT integration) and for optimizing production processes. A&D employs 70,600 people worldwide and in fiscal year 2006 (to September 30) earned a group profit of euro 1.572 billion on sales of euro 12.848 billion and orders of euro 14.108 billion, according to U.S. GAAP. Further information about A&D is available in the Internet at www.siemens.com/automation.

Note: Siemens and the Siemens logo are registered trademarks of Siemens AG. UGS Teamcenter and Teamcenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries. All other product names referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

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