Siemens' Teamcenter 9 Dials Systems Engineering Up a Notch

In addition to offering the usual smattering of user-requested bells and whistles, the latest version of Siemens PLM Software's Teamcenter platform zeros in on systems engineering -- which officials call a requirement for any PLM offering, given the increasingly complex nature of today's products.

Stuart Johnson, Siemens PLM Software's director of product marketing for Teamcenter, told us that it has offered requirement management and other systems engineering functionality as part of the Teamcenter portfolio for some time, but only in standalone modules and components that were not integrated into the core platform's unified data architecture. With Teamcenter 9's release, systems engineering functionality has been brought into the fold -- all the systems definitions of the product and the resulting interconnecting relationships are managed as part of the core product model.

Traditionally, engineering departments have deployed standalone tools to handle systems modeling, interface documentation, and requirements. This typically calls for a fair amount of data sharing across systems or (more than likely) plain old manual sharing of documents and files. In comparison, Teamcenter 9's systems-driven approach enables a common view of the system across all functional areas (and up and down the value chain), ensuring that all departments and disciplines are using synchronized product information.

This tight integration also helps avoid costly late-stage system integration problems that result from requirements not being closely tied to physical implementation -- a gaffe that has plagued many a high-profile product rollout, including that of the long-delayed Airbus A380 airliner.

"Now any change that happens to any element of a system diagram, subsystem, or requirements is automatically communicated to the people who need to know in Teamcenter," Johnson said. As a result, Teamcenter's standard change management practices can be used to communicate and manage changes.

The latest Teamcenter release offers improved integration with familiar, best-in-class tools, including Visio software, commonly used for definition and modeling, along with MathWorks' MATLAB and Simulink environments.