Trends that continue to place pressure on electronics manufacturers include:

• The Internet of Things, and the creation of new categories of innovative, connected devices to meet the needs of consumer and industrial applications
• Miniaturization, which demands more capabilities and speed in smaller spaces at lower costs and power consumption
• A continuous increase in the number of regional and global environmental regulations
• Problems with new product commercialization, as newly launched products suffer from notoriously high failure rates, often reaching 50 percent or greater
• The emergence of disruptive competitors offering low-cost, functionally rich products

To overcome these challenges and improve profitability while accelerating high-quality products to market, leaders in the electronics industry are driven to get the most from their new product development and introduction (NPDI) process.

"Digital Breakthrough" is the Siemens PLM Software perspective on how leading electronics manufacturers can more effectively manage their NPDI process to get the right products to market faster, while maintaining the highest quality and lowest cost. As a part of our Digital Breakthrough focus, we offer an integrated solution for NPDI cost and risk management, so that you can achieve accelerated development with high quality and competitiveness. This solution supports continuous management of costs, schedules, requirements, environmental compliance and design specifications across all phases of the NPDI process, while validating that design and manufacturing activities conform to design intent and customer expectations.

Cost Management

Cost analysis, management and visibility are critical to successfully assessing the overall market opportunity and profitability for a new product. To help you develop accurate and repeatable costing models that take into account multiple costing factors from materials, tooling, manufacturing processes and the value chain, we provide product cost management and analysis capabilities. This improves management visibility and insight into product cost drivers including components, materials, shipping, labor, machines, processes, and product unit volumes. You can model the interaction of product changes to one or more cost drivers, and provide enterprise-wide, standard product cost models from which to derive reasonable and high-quality cost forecasts and targets. Our solution allows you to replace isolated, incomplete and inconsistent spreadsheet-based product cost data with accurate and repeatable cost models that validate product profitability long before you have committed the costs to design and production.

Substance Compliance Management

Non-compliance can prevent a product’s introduction to the market or (worse) cause it to be pulled from the market. Our substance management capabilities help you efficiently demonstrate due diligence and verified product compliance against material content regulations (RoHS, REACH, WEEE, ePEAT, etc), and provide traceability of “conflict minerals” to promote responsible use of global materials. If you receive a customer or regulatory agency request for proof of compliance, you can quickly respond with configurable reports from a unified platform for substance and materials compliance.

Requirements Management

Every new product has a basis in the “voice of the customer.” The success in capturing this voice and translating it into product targets and specifications that can be understood and delivered by engineering, manufacturing and the supply chain can have a dramatic effect on the final customer acceptance of the product.

Our NPDI Cost and Risk Management solution provides you with a closed-loop requirements process that can capture the initial voice of the customer and trace it through the requirements identification, targets decomposition, specifications and final product validation.

All product decisions can be validated against the driving requirements and managed throughout the NPDI process. Requirements traceability can track validation and audit compliance to regulations, specifications and design intent. These capabilities can help you respond quickly to market opportunities and deliver products that better meet the customer needs, achieve the revenue and performance targets, ensure regulatory and contractual compliance, improve productivity and quality, and minimize risk.

Execution Management

Arriving late to market with a new product can compromise overall profitability and market share. NPDI Cost and Risk Management enables you to validate NPDI program execution against schedule constraints, and then drive the schedule with proactive workflows that update the status of the program in real time. You can automatically update schedule tasks, validate required deliverables for gate reviews, and manage all phases of development of multiple, concurrent projects, sharing resources across the organization.

Electronics and Semiconductor Catalyst

Siemens also offers a library of field-proven extensions to the Teamcenter PLM foundation, to provide rapid implementation based on industry-leading practices. The electronics and semiconductor catalyst tailors Teamcenter to work the way you work in the electronics industry, focusing on processes and information of specific interest across the NPDI process.

• A product and part maturity progression model optimizes NPDI visibility and supports risk management
• Part lifecycle process extensions manage electronic-specific part types
• Bill of materials (BOM) lifecycle process management elements address the complexities of electronics BOM changes
• Document lifecycle process enhancements support product and process quality document types
• Multistep and fast-track workflows enable flexible and agile change processes

The electronics and semiconductor catalyst accelerates customer deployment and solution productivity via a set of industry configuration components and best practice guides, which shorten time-to-value of PLM functionality critical to electronics companies.

Siemens unified solutions for the electronics and semiconductor industry accelerate the NPDI process so that you can get products to market faster, while reducing costs and increasing product quality. By optimizing your NPDI cost and risk management process, you will create better products, capture market share, gain customer loyalty, and achieve a digital breakthrough time and time again.