Making Teamcenter 10.1 Licensing Work with Older Teamcenter Versions

As more and more of you may be discovering since the Teamcenter 10.1 release a few weeks ago, Siemens PLM has changed many licensed feature names in Teamcenter 10.1 which do not work with older versions of Teamcenter. Also, the new Tc10.1 license file does not yet contain entries for some licensed features that exist in your pre-Tc10 license file.

This is type of thing causes us customers a lot of frustration since we need to install newer versions of license files to support development and upgrade testing of the newer versions while at the same time having to continue supporting the current production environment. This leaves customers in a bind since they (or at least I) do not plan to buy duplicate licenses of everything just for testing purposes.

There is a workaround to this problem that I have used over the years: combine the old and new license files into one file that serves both Teamcenter versions at the same time. I have successfully done this to support Tc10.1 development while still maintaining our Teamcenter 8.3 production environment.

To do this,

1) Copy the problematic or missing feature entries from your pre-Tc10 license file to your new Tc10 license file.

2) Install the latest version of the Flexlm licensing software.

3) Use the newly merged license file.

4) Reread license file using ‘lmreread’, or restart your license service.

I did this and am now to able to plan our next upgrade again while at the same time continuing to support our current Teamcenter environment.

Source : http://www.plmworld.org

Increase Profitability by Taking Control of Procurement Costs

When procuring a part, it is important for procurement officers to understand the supplier’s costs, their material costs, manufacturing costs, machine rates, labor and burden costs, etc. This wealth of  information provides a foundation for procurement officers to judge if the price quoted by the supplier is realistic, improving their negotiating position and allowing them to take control of procurement costs.

Unfortunately, obtaining these information is not easy, the efforts required to gather these information varies from one industry to another. In automotive, mechanical engineering or aerospace for example, it is especially difficult because a large portion of the purchasing budget applies to complex systems and assemblies. Another factor affecting costs is the lack of viable supplier choices, because only a few suppliers are able to produce such complex parts.

Traditional methods for cost analysis are based on stale and anecdotal after-the-fact data. Teamcenter Product Cost Management allows you leverage the same product lifecycle management (PLM) system you use to manage product development to predict and control product costs using data such as geometry, materials selection, part volumes, assembly and product definition. Teamcenter also provides a common database for critical information such as labor rates and material costs so that they can be updated once with the most recent data and reflected across multiple cost models.

Teamcenter Product Cost Management efficiently and accurately calculates costs and prices of purchased components from various material groups by performing process-based “shadow calculation” and bottom-up validation of purchase prices. With Teamcenter Product Cost Management you can easily calculate target prices for project purchasing, perform price verification for series purchasing, compare costs across multiple production sites to determine the best-cost country to source from, and perform make-or-buy analyses.

By having more accurate cost models and knowing the cost composition of a product, its materials, manufacturing and overhead costs, you can take control of the procurement negotiation to arrive at the desired product costs and increase your profitability.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is generally attributed to a newspaper editor, Arthur Brisbane, who first used it in a 1911 article about journalism.  At the time, photography was relatively new and Brisbane was conveying the notion that images (i.e. visualization) make it easy to communicate complex subjects compared to text. It was true then and it remains true today.

Visualization in the PLM domain is extremely beneficial because it increases clarity and understanding of complex products and processes. It leads to faster decision making1  and increases productivity. Siemens PLM is a leader in PLM visualization with viewers that take advantage of the ISO standard JT format for visualization. Our portfolio of viewers includes sophisticated Product Mockup tools (Teamcenter Visualization Mockup), free viewers (JT2GO), and everything in-between including embedded viewers ( Teamcenter Lifecycle Viewer) and a software development toolkit (PLM Vis).

In fact, there are so many viewers that I’d like to take this opportunity to give you a “picture” (well, ok, it’s a table) of all of our viewers so you can pick the one(s) that meets your needs.

Most of these products are self-explanatory, with the exception of PLM Vis, so I’ll elaborate a bit. The basic explanation is that PLM Vis enables our customers to enhance and create custom applications that include visualization based on our commercial technology and the JT standard.

Of course, some development effort is required, but our customers think it’s worth it because “a picture is worth a thousand words”…..

By enhancing existing applications, customers are able to continue to work using their existing processes while improving productivity through the addition of graphics; for example:

An automotive company developed an in-house Issues Tracking application that referenced JT files. The company embedded PLM Vis into this application so that the 3D models are visible alongside the issue description.  This increased clarity and improved the solution time.

A consumer electronics company enhanced their in-house workflow application by using PLM Vis to visualize 2D and 3D data. This greatly enhanced the approval process by eliminating the need for a separate viewing application. Stakeholders benefited from greater clarity throughout the process.

Customers also use PLM Vis to create new sophisticated applications that include visualization using the same robust commercial technology we use in our own products. These custom applications increase productivity because they are company and data specific and have a focused, streamlined Ux. They may also enable sophisticated capabilities that are not available in “out of the box” solutions. For example:

An aerospace company embedded controls in their drawing files to launch a 3D model view of the corresponding location.  This reduced the time required to understand a complex drawing, identify potential problem areas and make modifications if required.

Hopefully, you now have a better “picture” of what can be done with PLM Vis. PLM Vis provides our customers with the ability to enhance or create custom visualization applications using the same technology that is the foundation for our entire visualization portfolio. It’s an important part of the Siemens PLM visualization portfolio and offers the ultimate in flexibility with respect to Ux and non Teamcenter data integration.  PLM Vis based applications are robust, tailored to a company’s specific needs and enable faster, smarter decision making.