Powering Global Product Development - New Capabilities in Teamcenter 2005 Optimize Global Performance
Today's increased focus on revenue growth and international competitiveness has driven manufacturing companies to seek new ways to accelerate product development through process innovation, global alliances, and strategic partnerships. Shifting business and market dynamics demand agility undreamed-of even a decade ago. However, along with the new opportunities, globalization has also created tough new challenges.
Teamcenter addresses these challenges to power innovation and productivity by connecting people and processes with knowledge. With the launch of Teamcenter 2005, Teamcenter provides a number of capabilities critical to ensure that globally distributed teams are most able to harness their collective abilities:
- Collaborative virtual development
- Configuration management
- Program execution management
- Product and process validation
Collaborative Virtual Development: Working Together as a Global Innovation Network
Creating a global innovation network, consisting of supply chain, design and manufacturing teams, partners, and alliances, is a key enabler for competitive advantage. In an ideal world this extended network would act in a seamless manner with all key participants behaving as if they were part of the same organization, without any restrictions on communications and collaboration, and working to the same goals.
Teamcenter enables each authorized participant in the product lifecycle to immediately access a single source of accurate and up-to-date product and process knowledge. Teams can work together, in a secure and managed environment, on the same information, regardless of their location, discipline or company.
Configuration and Portfolio Management: Balance Product Flexibility with the Need for Standardization
Manufacturers are challenged to maximize re-use while preserving the differentiation across the brands/product lines. The ability to maximize reuse enables customers to respond to new market opportunities. The objective is to leverage "global" platforms with local product variations. Modularization is increasingly being used to maximize profit from innovation in as many areas as possible.
Teamcenter provides advanced capabilities to configure and manage product and process configuration at every step in the product development process at a variety of levels. From requirements, through product design, to manufacturing processes, Teamcenter is able to provide the modularity needed across the product lifecycle to balance product flexibility with the need for standardization.
Program Execution Management: Integrating Product Knowledge with the Processes to Manage the Program
Coordinating the efforts of any group is always hard. Ensuring a coordinated and consistent approach with a distributed, extended team across different geographic, cultural and business zones is extremely challenging - especially when faced with intense market demands from global customers and competitors.
Teamcenter delivers program execution management by integrating the product definition, the ability to manage the processes associated with those products, and the people needed to undertake the processes in one system. Teamcenter manages the product complexity associated with the design, simulation, and manufacturing processes; while providing visibility to the people who need to undertake those processes. Components can be re-used, designs are interoperable, processes are managed, standardized and continually assessed, groups are coordinated, and costs are reduced.
Product and Process Validation: Advanced Change Impact Analysis for Complex Products
With increased competitive pressures, additional local regulatory requirements, increased numbers of participants and increasing numbers of product and process variations; the ability of existing engineering process support systems to respond in a timely fashion is being outstripped. To quote one of UGS' customer challenges ... "How do you repeatedly mockup a snapshot of a 50,000-component product line, with 500 options, worked on by hundreds of people, 24 hours a day, distributed across the world, in different organizations and companies, then automatically validate it?"
Teamcenter represents a major step forward in addressing complex product design, offering the kind of advanced change-impact analysis that stand-alone change management, virtual prototyping, and product data management offerings can't. Ultimately Teamcenter sets the stage for validating the complete product for packaging, analysis, process simulation, manufacturability, test, and more.
Teamcenter is enabling global product development every day for companies of all sizes - from small suppliers to many of the very largest global companies with tens of thousands of users sharing data in real time around the clock, around the world.
For more information on UGS' approach to global product development, ask your UGS sales representative for details and read the "Powering global product development" executive brief
