UGS Launches Teamcenter 2005 With Three Initiatives Focused On Specific Business Requirements
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UGS Launches Teamcenter 2005 With Three Initiatives Focused On Specific Business Requirements

UGS Corp. announced the launch of Teamcenter 2005 software, a landmark release of the entire portfolio of UGS' digital lifecycle management solution. Teamcenter 2005 represents the world's first comprehensive software portfolio to integrate idea management and requirements planning with comprehensive digital product development, digital manufacturing and digital lifecycle management processes.

The announcement underscores UGS' continued leadership in the high- growth collaborative product development management (cPDM) segment of the PLM industry. With more than two million seats in production globally, Teamcenter is the world's most widely used PLM solution that serves as the enterprise collaboration backbone for companies seeking a comprehensive integrated digital manufacturing process. In the first quarter of 2005, the company signed 22 enterprise contracts — defined as contracts with total contract value of more than US$1 million each — nearly doubling the number of enterprise contracts signed during the same period a year earlier — driving 38.4 percent total revenue growth in cPDM.

"Teamcenter has established its strong leadership position in the PLM industry through UGS' consistent focus on our customers' business success," said Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president of Products, UGS. "With Teamcenter 2005, UGS has delivered advanced new platform technology designed to speed implementations across all aspects of a product's lifecycle. As a result companies can more quickly and effectively transform their processes of innovation to bring new and exciting products to market. By delivering fully integrated, applications for up-front product planning and strategy, along with enhanced integration to Microsoft Office applications, Teamcenter 2005 effectively closes the gap between ideation and innovative product solutions."

Focused On Business Requirements — The Three Initiatives

UGS' focus for Teamcenter 2005 is centered on addressing three of the industry's most critical business initiatives associated with product development and lifecycle management.
    — New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI)
    — Global Product Development
    — Regulatory Compliance
The effective management and execution of each of these business initiatives can have a profound effect on an organization's ability to drive profit and revenue growth from new and existing product lines. Teamcenter 2005 includes functional enhancements throughout the entire product portfolio to support each initiative. New and existing Teamcenter customers — such as Callaway Golf — are expected to benefit from these enhancements.

"Callaway is constantly striving for innovation in a challenging product development environment that includes a global supply chain," said Dave Oakley, vice president Rapid Design & Development, Callaway Golf. "Combining this environment with the highly competitive market we serve produces a daunting demand for speed. By enabling us to more effectively communicate and collaborate on product designs with our key suppliers — regardless of their location — Teamcenter helps Callaway meet this demand while enabling us to maintain superior product quality. We look forward to the enhancements in Teamcenter 2005 to keep us one step ahead of our competition."

NPDI — Transforming the Best Ideas into Innovative Products

With the launch of Teamcenter 2005, UGS is delivering the most comprehensive solution for capturing an organization's best ideas — using familiar office productivity tools — and then helping them build those ideas into innovative products.

Companies realize that their success is dependant on the successful launch of new innovative products and services. For many organizations, the majority of their current revenue is generated by products that will be obsolete within five years. Yet history shows that the majority of new product ideas never make it to market and of those that do over half fail because they do not meet customer requirements or they are too late to capture market share.

According to the AMR Research Report, The Product Lifecycle Management Applications Report, 2003-2008, "The common thread across all manufacturers is getting the right innovative products to market faster than the competition, with sufficient supply and at an attractive profit."

However, a significant obstacle to successfully delivering more new products to market has been efficiently turning ideas into requirements and executing on these requirements to deliver innovative products. To date there has been a lack of scalable applications designed to support the complex decision making process associated with NPDI. In fact, most organizations today use common word processing and spreadsheet applications, such as those found in Microsoft Office, to manage their NPDI process.

According to Kevin O'Marah writing in the AMR Research Report, Trends in New Product Development and Introduction Processes, 2004, "Current tools dominating the NPDI process are low-cost, low-function personal productivity tools like spreadsheets, project management, and word processing."

However the same companies using these tools identified PLM-related software as their most strategic investments necessary to improve their NPDI processes. Again, according to Kevin O'Marah in the AMR Research Report, Trends in New Product Development and Introduction Processes, 2004, "Project management, CAD, and PLM are the three most critical technology tools when it comes to the success of the NPDI process."

Addressing this need to deliver sophisticated tools targeted specifically at the NPDI process, Teamcenter 2005 introduces a comprehensive NPDI solution that builds on the common office tools already in use at most organizations. Through its close relationship and strategic alliance with Microsoft, UGS is able to take advantage of Teamcenter's tight integration with Microsoft applications along with the leading scalability and new functionality in Teamcenter 2005 to help organizations realize the full benefit of NPDI.

Significant enhancements in Teamcenter 2005 address the NPDI process in a variety of ways, including:
    — To promote and capture innovation, an open and collaborative environment is presented in which free thinking ideas are fostered, gathered, shared, discussed and filtered within an organization as well as with partners and customers.
    — To exploit innovation, Teamcenter 2005 provides a collaborative decision support framework in which the most promising ideas can be objectively investigated, evaluated, compared and communicated.
    — To execute on innovation, Teamcenter 2005 facilitates organizational collaboration so that individuals can work together more efficiently to manage and coordinate new product development and introduction and accelerate success.
    — Finally, to deliver on innovation, Teamcenter 2005 provides a framework of planning and execution tools that optimize product and services launch processes.
"Microsoft is committed to working with key partners like UGS to help enterprise organizations facilitate collaboration and improve the product development cycle," said Don Richardson, director of the Manufacturing Industry Unit for Microsoft. "By building on the Microsoft foundation, Teamcenter's leading PLM functionality and scalability significantly enhance new product development and help drive peak performance across the entire manufacturing industry."

Global Product Development — Turning Globalization into a Competitive Advantage

By enabling effective global collaboration, Teamcenter 2005 transforms the globally distributed enterprise into a competitive advantage by leveraging the strengths of each location and minimizing the drawbacks of a widely dispersed project team.

Globalization has dramatically changed the way products are produced by manufacturers of all sizes. Small to medium size organizations are just as likely to engage in global outsourcing as a huge multinational enterprise. Globally distributed teams need to effectively communicate and collaborate throughout the product development process to produce innovative products of the highest quality in the least amount of time. As this trend continues, companies are realizing that new solutions are needed to manage this complex environment.

Teamcenter helps more organizations manage global product development than any other PLM solution. Recognizing global product development as one of its customers' critical business initiatives, UGS offers several features and enhancements in Teamcenter 2005 to ensure that geographically dispersed design and manufacturing teams can effectively compete and prosper in a global environment.

Teamcenter 2005 includes a wide variety of enhancements and rich functionality to support Global Product Development.
    — Simplified installation and deployment of automated digital validation capabilities.
    — Enhanced integrations with the Microsoft Office System, Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Windows Share Point Services v2.
    — Further expansion of the industry's most complete Multi-CAD management with added support for UGS NX CAE/Routing, Autodesk Inventor, Mentor Graphics harness, Cadence PCB, Zuken PCB, and ECAD visualization.
    — Best-in-class product definition management tools including product structure management, configuration management, change management and CAD integration.
    — Unique, highly productive working environment for integrating company specific business processes, like engineering change management, supplier integration, new product introduction, release to manufacturing and document management.
    — Project Management capability with Workflow enables customers to make critical program/project milestones visible and understand the impact of a change on the program plan.
    — Integrated Requirements capability enables companies to capture market and compliance requirements and make them visible during the product development cycle, thus empowering users to validate changes and assess their impact against specifications.
    — Worldwide collaboration among a broad variety of users across the corporate enterprise is enabled through integrated visualization allowing users to view, markup and analyze any type of corporate data, including CAD models.
    — Ability to synchronize design data, share design models in workflow driven processes and collaborate across a fully digital product development environment.
"The functional enhancements in Teamcenter 2005 provide the tools necessary to effectively manage a global product development environment, but equally important are the ongoing advancements in hardware platform technology that make it all possible," said Chris Kelley, vice president, UGS Partner Program. "UGS and Intel have been working together for over eight years to ensure that UGS' innovative software solutions keep pace with the continual and rapid innovations delivered through Intel's mobile, workstation, desktop and server platform technologies. By ensuring our software solutions take full advantage of the performance, functionality, scalability, reliability and affordability of Intel platforms, UGS helps its customers maximize their investments in our solutions."

Regulatory Compliance — Built-In Compliance Management Improves Profitability

Most product producing organizations are required to achieve some level of regulatory compliance, yet the associated costs and time necessary to document and demonstrate compliance may negatively impact the bottom line by delaying time-to-market, reducing profits or hampering innovation. Teamcenter 2005 introduces several new enhancements that enable companies to strike a balance between regulatory compliance and lifecycle performance, which can lead to reduced compliance costs and improved profitability.

Teamcenter 2005 provides a functional foundation that enables customers to directly enforce and validate regulatory compliance. Key capabilities include the management of information access, retrieval and retention, along with process visibility and integrity. Teamcenter 2005 includes enhanced document and records retention management capabilities, including support for DoD 5015.2 standards. This foundation provides the base for process-specific and industry-driven compliance challenges including, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance management, environmental mandates such as ELV (End of Life Vehicle), RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances), and WEEE (Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment), medical device mandates such as CFR Part 11 and 820, and export controls such as ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), and EAR (Export Administration Regulations).

Admittedly, this is a pretty long-winded announcement, but one that has significant impact and importance for UGS' PLM strategy. TeamCenter and NX comprise both major sides of the UGS PLM house, much like Windchill and Pro/ENGINEER do for PTC. Just the scale of the three initiatives, however, is reason enough to break them out like they did.

TeamCenter is UGS' term for, not one, but the nine collective products that, along with NX, make up its PLM offering. When things are working as they should, the various products comprise a common set of system services, a set of internal and shared services, as well as visualization and collaboration utilities. The former SDRC I-DEAS and current NX (including Unigraphics) applications create models for the PLM environment, all of which work through a common user interface that also runs through TeamCenter.

Keep in mind that most of the functionality of TeamCenter comes from previously branded products from acquired companies (a lot from SDRC). Today, TeamCenter has nine modules and here is where they were derived from, or rather, what they were formerly known as: On top of all this stuff, PLM Integrator is what UGS employs/deploys to get everything outside of its product range to communicate to the TeamCenter "stack" of products. On top of that, services must integrate with SQL, SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft, even Siebel, together with adapters for legacy systems, intranets, extranets, Webservers, and the myriad possible applications from other vendors. Gets complicated, doesn't it?

I don't know for sure, and I could find no hard figures to support this, but I would venture to guess that there are close to 900,000 seats of TeamCenter (including "formerly known as") out there in the world today. However you count it, numbers that aren't too shabby.

Related to this TeamCenter announcement is UGS' launch late last year of its Open Manufacturing Backbone (OMB) - a scalable technology foundation designed to facilitate digital manufacturing processes through an open environment in which third-party software applications can interoperate.

Not too surprisingly, the technology foundation for OMB is UGS' Teamcenter Manufacturing, a platform for helping companies digitize and manage their manufacturing processes so they can get better products into production for less cost. Process, resource, plant and product data all reside in a single integrated data manager within Teamcenter Manufacturing that lets different applications work with one another. As a result, third-party digital manufacturing applications - including those developed by UGS customers, competitors, strategic partners or other third parties - can interoperate within OMB.

As things evolve, it will be interesting to see how open UGS really is with TeamCenter with regard to interoperability. With its JT file format, theoretically, anyone can build an application on it, but interoperability still remains a very tall order. Although, it wasn't all that long ago that UGS (then EDS) opened its technology at least somewhat in deals with Autodesk and PTC. But, with fierce competition continuing for large-scale customers, you have to wonder if or when there will be any significant degree of openness between UGS and its French competitor.

Editor's Note - MCADCafe's Revamped Book Section!

We have just completed a major overhaul to our Books section. Here are some of the highlights:
  1. Hundreds of new industry specific books have been added
  2. The Book section is now sorted by Amazon sales ranking (the lower the ranking number, the higher the popularity of the book). So, the most popular books in any section are displayed first
  3. The Book section can now be sorted by "Book Title", "Author", "Date of publication", or "Ranking"
  4. Books include editorial and customer reviews, when available
  5. A search capability has been added
  6. Books can be listed by "categories"
  7. The Book section is updated weekly

The Week's Top 5

At MCADCafé we track many things, including the stories that have attracted the most interest from our subscribers. Below are the five news items that were the most viewed during last week.

SolidWorks Drives Aggressive Growth Strategy With Siebel CRM Solutions
SolidWorks sells the majority of its software solutions using an indirect sales model, working through nearly 400 partners worldwide, making relationships with partners and customers equally critical to the success of the business. Now, 92 percent of all VAR ordering is done through a portal — a significant increase over previous systems. SolidWorks uses Siebel Call Center to efficiently manage partner service requests and inquiries. Siebel Marketing enables SolidWorks to design and roll out marketing campaigns and to evaluate the success of campaigns over time. With Siebel, SolidWorks has automated the entire partner process from quotations and pricing to order placement and license renewals. And finally, with Siebel Customer Order Management, SolidWorks is able to rapidly capture and fulfill orders placed by its partners. Previously, products ordered via partners by U.S. customers took up to 8 days to be fulfilled, while European customers had to wait up to 13 days for their orders. Siebel Customer Order Management has reduced this order fulfillment time to less than two days for most orders.

Siemens Automation and Drives Standardizes On PTC Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire
PTC announced that Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D) has selected PTC Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 as its platform for 3D mechanical CAD. Siemens A&D is the world's leading manufacturer in the field of automation and drives. Siemens A&D chose PTC as its CAD mainline system after conducting a rigorous vendor selection review which evaluated several leading CAD systems. As a result Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire will be deployed in Europe, North America, and Asia to replace 100 competitive CAD seats. Siemens A&D plans to begin the next phase in its global product development strategy by introducing innovative PTC solutions to support global data management and collaboration for 3D mechanical product data.

L-3 Communication Systems West Purchases Lattice3D 3D Publishing Tools
Lattice3D announced that L-3 Communication Systems West, a division of New York based L-3 Communications has purchased Lattice3D's 3D Publishing platform as part of its initiative to further optimize its operations and provide an even higher level of service to its clients. Lattice3D's technology is being employed to provide interactive documentation for use on the manufacturing floor, and for interactive design reviews that will shorten the path from product design to implementation. Lattice3D develops and markets leading 3D Communication and Publishing applications on a robust platform to enable the rapid use of 3D data assets downstream of design. 3D CAD models and designs can be used directly in print and online user and employee manuals, parts lists, maintenance instructions, assembly instructions, and IETMs, etc.

Report: IBM Dominates Global Supercomputing
TOP500, a supercomputer ranking authority, named an IBM supercomputing system as the world's most powerful supercomputer in the world. IBM's Blue Gene/L tops the list with a sustained performance of 136.8 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second. The system developed with IBM's primary partner, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, is being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California and is planned to grow to a 360 Teraflop Blue Gene/L supercomputer when completed this summer. IBM's new Watson Blue Gene system, installed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, debuts at number two with 91.29 TF as the world's most powerful privately owned supercomputer.

CADTRAIN's COACH/LMS Helps Raytheon with Knowledge Management
CADTRAIN, a provider of e-Learning for Pro/ENGINEER, has added additional capabilities into its COACH/LMS product to help companies like Raytheon bridge the gap between learning and knowledge management. Raytheon has been using CADTRAIN's COACH/LMS product since 2001 and has seen a high adoption rate for users completing the Pro/E training and developing their Pro/E skills. However, becoming an effective engineer at Raytheon requires more than just Pro/E training. It is also critical to know engineering best practices, corporate best practices, six sigma and other skills related to Raytheon's product development processes. Raytheon in Tucson was the first division to use COACH/LMS as the key component of their Top Gun Certification Program. With the success achieved at several Raytheon locations, COACH/LMS has now been extended to the rest of Raytheon's facilities worldwide.


Jeffrey Rowe is the editor and publisher of MCADCafé and MCAD Weekly Review. He can be reached here or 408.850.9230.

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