Siemens PLM Conference Attracts 1,800 plus

Grindstaff said that the five years of Siemens ownership of Siemens PLM (www.siemens.com/plm) has given the company tremendous benefit as shown in the company's growth over the time. The significant announcement was that the company has initiated a vertical solutions support organization in order to work more closely with customers in those industry segments.

Significant trends impacting manufacturing and the product lifecycle management (PLM) market according to Grindstaff were Big Data, product complexity, integrated systems and computational expansion. He mentioned Siemens PLM's commitment to open--open culture, open data, open products and open communities--something reiterated by other executives the remainder of the day.

Eric Sterling, senior vice president, general manager, Lifecycle Collaboration Software, a recent report said that we are about to enter the Third Wave of Manufacturing and it is the coming of digital and software. "We've been there already," he concluded.

New Products
In new product news, Siemens PLM Software released Teamcenter 9 and Active Workspace.

Teamcenter 9 delivers new solutions and enhancements across the portfolio in support of Siemens PLM Software’s HD-PLM vision, which was established to help companies make better informed decisions more efficiently and with a higher level of confidence.

The Teamcenter 9 release adds a new integrated systems engineering solution and tightens the integration across the unified architecture.

The systems engineering solution provides a fully-integrated approach to systems engineering and requirements management. Teamcenter delivers a more systems-driven approach to product development that is managed from within the Teamcenter environment. This enables a common view of the system up and down the value chain.

Technical documentation is a critical component of product development as it supports the delivery of documents such as user guides and repair manuals along with the release of a product. In the past, product development needed to be completed before documentation could be created due to the ever-changing nature of design. The enhanced integration of content management in Teamcenter 9 allows product documentation to be created in parallel with the design process.

A tighter integration to Cortona3D’s Rapid Author application enables documents to be created with illustrations that remain linked to the design data they describe so changes can ripple all the way through to the documentation.

Service Lifecycle Management has been enhanced with a new service scheduling and execution module. Service scheduling and execution have traditionally been separate activities conducted outside of PLM. This has made it difficult to track whether service has been completed in compliance with published procedures. Teamcenter 9 integrates the service scheduling and execution management solutions, enabling companies to more effectively control cost by defining and efficiently scheduling service orders and tasks.

Active Workspace
Active Workspace is an intuitive, highly visual and personalized environment for accessing intelligent 3D information. Active Workspace is another important step towards realizing Siemens PLM Software’s High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) vision, which was established to help decision makers make better informed decisions more efficiently and with a higher level of confidence.

Visualizing information is crucial to understanding complexity, whether information is textual, a network diagram of related items, or a complex 3D product design. Active Workspace provides easy-to-use tools for visualizing and navigating information and, once the right information is found, easily saving or sharing it with others.

Active Workspace is scalable and can handle all types and sizes of PLM environments, from hundreds to millions of items of information, and from a massive collection of documents to complex 3D geometry.