Siemens Industry Automation Division made two important releases in late June: a new version of its Product Lifecycle Management software, Teamcenter; and a new release of Technomatix, its digital manufacturing suite.
Calling Teamcenter “the world’s most widely used PLM system,” Siemens PLM Software said the Teamcenter 8 release focuses on individual, application and IT productivity. The new version has an extensive Microsoft Outlook user interface, as well as integration with Microsoft Office 2007. Teamcenter 8 now makes it easier for MS Office users to interact with product information directly from within the Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint programs. And, it embeds a “Teamcenter To Do List” inside of Outlook, so users can manage scheduling, workflow and engineering change assignments based on Teamcenter.
Siemens PLM says Teamcenter will 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 ECADs. So, users can save native design files and perform check-in and check-out operations, and they can access approved components, populate electrical component bills-of-materials, share fabrication and assembly data, and create and manage other types of derived ECAD data files.
Other Teamcenter 8 enhancements that improve individual productivity include workflow improvements for dynamic participants, feedback loops, and asynchronous operations, as well as change and issues management.
Siemens PLM’s other recent release is an update of Tecnomatix, its digital manufacturing suite. Enhancements to Tecnomatix 9, new features for process planning, robotics simulation and commissioning, are aimed at optimizing planning and manufacturing productivity.
The Tecnomatix suite allows users to deploy collaborative engineering to improve the efforts and results for manufacturers trying to bring products to market faster.
Tecnomatix “leverages” Teamcenter software, from process authoring through simulation to documentation, particularly to help with “change management.”
New features in Tecnomatix 9 are aimed at automating various planning tasks. For example, one new function allows for rapid creation and exploration of alternate product assembly/ disassembly sequences to optimize this planning task and save time in creating assembly documentation. Another uses a higher-level task description to manipulate the human model component in 3D virtual environments. This can reduce the time required for a simulation study, so there is more time to evaluate various what-if scenarios.
