Siemens PLM Software has announced the release of the latest version of its widely used digital manufacturing solution for manufacturing engineering, Tecnomatix 11. The latest release offers a more advanced digital manufacturing solution that promises to deliver smart, fast, and lean manufacturing, including Manufacturing Process Management (MPM).

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In late November 2012, Siemens and Bentley Systems announced a strategic collaboration to integrate digital product design and manufacturing processes design offerings by Siemens PLM Software with information modeling for facilities lifecycle design offerings by Bentley. Initially, the companies will focus on the digital factory for automotive and discrete manufacturing. In other words, the Siemens Industry Automation Division and Bentley will initially collaborate on common file formats and content, integrated workflows for factory layout, and the convergence of process and layout. This work is an extension of earlier collaborations between the two organizations that resulted in each deploying technology offerings developed by the other (see the related news item).

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What Siemens alluded to us at its two-day Siemens PLM analyst summit in early September 2012 is now official—the vendor has announced that its flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) software Teamcenter is available on the cloud, adding another platform option for Teamcenter customers. Teamcenter on the cloud delivered through an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model extends Siemens PLM Software’s “platform of choice” strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Recent years have seen the Siemens Industry Automation Division extend its leading position in the industrial software market with the acquisition of UGS in the United States in 2007, innotec in Germany in 2008, Elan Software Systems in France in 2009, the Brazilian company Active Tecnologia em Sistemas de Automação, Vistagy in the US in 2011, and the German IBS AG in 2012. All of these companies were leading industrial software suppliers in their respective fields. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises in a strategic sense. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

Tecnomatix became part of the Siemens PLM family of products in 2007, having been created in 1983 in Israel to offer manufacturing process management (MPM) solutions. It acquired Unicam Software (a provider of software to manage the production of printed circuit boards) in 1999 and USDATA (a provider of the production control solution FactoryLink and manufacturing execution system Xfactory) in 2003. In 2007, USG Corporation acquired Tecnomatix and combined its products with their MPM solutions.

Version 10 of Tecnomatix was released in 2011, and Siemens PLM recently announced the release of version 10.1 at their annual user conference for the Americas, Siemens PLM Connection. During the event, I had the chance to talk with Shaun Ennis, strategic communications and analyst relations (AR) manager, as well as with other Siemens PLM executives. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises, to a strategic degree. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

In this day and age of globalization, ever-shorter new product introduction (NPI) cycles and overall product lifecycles, partner collaboration, and whatnot, product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions have lately increased their strategic significance to enterprises. In his recent Forbes blog post contribution, PTC’s CEO Jim Heppelmann touts PLM as a new path to shareholder value. He argues that the PLM repository of data should be an enterprise system of record rather than mundane transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. Read the rest of this entry »

Siemens recently closed the acquisition of Vistagy, incorporating it into Siemens PLM Software. Vistagy is a provider of specialized engineering solutions including applications for design and manufacture of advanced composite materials.

Composite materials are made of two or more constituent materials that when mixed retain distinct properties. The composite is generally designed to achieve a specific set of attributes, such as lightness, strength, flexibility, durability, etc. Despite their high cost, composites are increasingly being used to manufacture disk brakes for sports and luxury cars and orthopedic dentures, as well as being used in airplanes, wind turbines, and even space ships. Read the rest of this entry »

In Why Some People Don’t Like PLM, Graham McCall said that some product lifecycle management (PLM) users’ reluctance to share knowledge with others is the obstacle toward higher acceptance of PLM. I thought his point made perfect sense, and my instant reaction was to ask myself: How can this problem be resolved? Ideally, a PLM system is a platform for people to work together. This means that knowledge sharing is mutually beneficial—by sharing knowledge with others, you also get hold of others’ knowledge. This sounds like an incentive for PLM users to share their knowledge, but when it comes to the real PLM environment in production, this is not always the case.

My thought stopped there for a while and then came back to me after I attended the Siemens Industry Software Analyst Conference because I felt things that I saw at the event were quite relevant to the cure I was looking for. Read the rest of this entry »

A little while ago, in her post Beware Supply Chain Excel Users—YOU are DOOMED!!!!, my colleague Khudsiya Quadri warned Microsoft Excel users that Excel is not a good option when enterprise applications are expected to be used. Reading her post and the comments that followed is a good exercise in learning different perspectives from different people. However, in my post, I’ll refrain from agreeing or disagreeing, but rather I’ll open another discussion that is also related to Excel—the user interface (UI). Read the rest of this entry »

After talking about Dassault Systèmes in Part 2 of this blog series, I’d like to move to another prominent player in the product lifecycle management (PLM) field—Siemens PLM Software. In this blog post, I will give my personal interpretations about the major relevancies between Siemens PLM’s offerings and lean product development (LPD).

My first impression of Siemens PLM is the comprehensiveness of its product offerings. The company provides both PLM tools (e.g., computer-aided design [CAD], digital manufacturing, and simulation) and PLM (i.e., collaborative Product Definition management [cPDm]). Also, Teamcenter is one of the few PLM solutions that provide the broadest functionality coverage I have seen. In addition, Some Teamcenter capabilities (such as sourcing and maintenance) show the company’s attempt to expand support to a wider range of business processes. A broader functional coverage of a PLM system allows more parties in an organization to be involved within one system thus provides a possibility to increase the efficiency of the product development processes. Besides this general impression, the following two elements are the most significant ones that relate Siemens PLM to LPD. Read the rest of this entry »