PLM Soup

On Tuesday, the Plant Simulation User Conference in Stuttgart, Germany will start. I will share details from the conference here on the blog and on Twitter. It will be a very interesting conference with more than 100 users attending. Several customers from different industries like automotive, shipyards and universities will talk about their projects. In addition the product management team will share insight about development projects and current trends.

For more details about the success and optimization of our customers just visit the Plant Simulation product page.

Machine tools are products and resources; depending on your view point. For the machine builder it’s a product, while for many manufacturing companies it’s a resource they use to manufacture their products.

Siemens not only provides PLM solutions for machine builders, but as well the control and motion equipment. It’s a logical step to combine and enhance these solutions and provide the full service to our customers. One major step was done at this year’s EMO, where we presented the extension of our PLM solution for machine builder.

The solution now covers the full industrial process of a machine builder; starting with the design and simulation of the machine tool down to manufacturing, assembly and maintenance. We extended the solution to support the maintenance activities of a machine tool. These activities are part of the overall service package when selling machine tools. The second extension of the PLM solution is dedicated to all the electronic components and its management during the lifecycle of a machine tool. This is important as these electronic components are responsible for a major increase in innovations of machine tools.

For more details about the PLM solution for machine builders just visit the machinery and industrial products homepage.

Want to see more pictures from the EMO; visit us on Flickr.

A few folks have asked me what I think of the Dassault/IBM announcement earlier this week. So I thought I’d share some thoughts here and answer any questions you might have.

The first question is what do we think of this announcement. After reading through the press release, it seems what they’re really announcing is the next logical step in their relationship, which has changed over the years.

The next question is how it affects our relationship with IBM. You may remember we announced an expanded alliance in June emphasizing Teamcenter’s preconfiguration with the IBM blue stack of technology. From what I can tell it doesn’t – and in fact it probably helps. As one analyst put it this levels “the playing field.”

The interesting part for me is that over the past few years we’ve made a concerted effort to grow our indirect sales channel, signing many new partners (such as Rand) and focusing on helping partners become more productive. When I came back to this company four years ago it was the beginning of a whole new channel expansion effort. It appears Dassault is going the other direction. Who’s to say which way is best. Time will have to tell. There are challenges to both. We’ve always had a strong, integrated services division and now Dassault will too.

The good news for customers is that it removes any conflict of interest for the IBM PLM personnel we work with. In the past they were restricted from pursuing named Dassault accounts. So it should  enable more competition in those accounts, which is a good thing for customers.

I think this announcement also shows IBM’s committed to being a PLM advisor that is not dependent on a single PLM vendor. 

Those are just my thoughts but you may want to check out more of what media & analysts are saying:

Beth Stackpole notes: “While the IBM/Dassault partnership was never exclusive, the proposed sale will give IBM more opportunity to offer consulting and integration services around other PLM offerings. In June, IBM took some key steps toward that scenario with the announcement of a deal with Siemens PLM Software on a set of PLM applications and consulting offerings based on Siemens' Teamcenter platform and IBM's middleware and service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework.”

Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity blogged: “IBM customers may be using DS solutions, or they could be using software from Siemens, PTC, or others. So IBM has developed relationships with these PLM companies. This is just the natural way of things in a multi-vendor market, and it is probably the most beneficial relationship for DS and IBM customers…PLM is still very strategic to IBM. But directly selling and servicing PLM software from one vendor no longer makes sense…”

Monica Schnitger of Schnitger Corp. blogged: “For IBM, the sale of the PLM business is probably just a natural part of their business expansion and contraction. Their history with DS has, at times, been harmonious and, at others, fractious. … Too, IBM inked a technology pact with Siemens earlier this year that raised questions about its commitment to DS. All said, IBM can now focus its resources on partners that may be less contentious and technology areas that it sees as having greater potential…”

Brad Holtz of Cyon Research tweeted: “DS gets a great price. Siemens and PTC get a level playing field. Customers get direct relationship. IBM focus on PLM areas with > growth” and blogged: “Siemens PLM Software and PTC, long envious of the IBM-Dassault Systemes marriage, wish the former couple their best, but are likely to be thrilled at the opportunity to interact with an unconflicted IBM….Customers of the former couple are expected to rejoice at the clarity that the new situation brings.”

Ken Wong, Desktop Engineering reported: Beside simplifying the customer acquisition and retention process, DS can soon exercise greater control over its large accounts, which IBM now handles for the company. The transfer of the sales team to DS is expected to let IBM concentrate on providing PLM consulting and integration services, the domains Big Blue is best equipped to tackle. It also leaves IBM free to resell PLM products from DS’ rivals, if it chooses to.

And in case you missed it in June, here is a blog post and video of one of our customers, Tano Maenza, who is director of program management office for PLM implementations at Emerson. He noted how they work with a combined Siemens PLM-IBM team.

Feel free to share any of your questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to get you answers.

These shortcuts speed up navigating directory structures directly from the Solid Edge & file open dialogue.

Note: The video above is pulled from YouTube. If you subscribe to Siemens PLM channel, you can be notified right away when we post the latest video from our Tips & Tricks series. There is a playlist on YouTube just for the Tips & Tricks, check it out here. We also realize that some of you do not have access to YouTube, so you can always check out the Solid Edge Demo Page.

Use these pro tips for quickly building assemblies.

Note: The video above is pulled from YouTube. If you subscribe to Siemens PLM channel, you can be notified right away when we post the latest video from our Tips & Tricks series. There is a playlist on YouTube just for the Tips & Tricks, check it out here. We also realize that some of you do not have access to YouTube, so you can always check out the Solid Edge Demo Page.

It’s all about integration. Imaging you are running a job shop using highly flexible machine tools. You manufacture in small lot sizes and need to adjust your NC programs quite often due to product changes. How do you keep track of all the product changes? And how do you ensure, that the updated NC programs and information about the required tools are transferred from the planning department to the right machine tool on the shop floor?

The joint solution from Siemens PLM Software and Siemens Motion Control Systems now helps you to answer these questions. The solution connects Teamcenter with the Motion Control Information System (MCIS). To be more precise; linking Teamcenter to two MCIS solution components – Direct Numerical Control (DNC) and Tool Data Information (TDI).

Have a look at the official press release and read about Peter Thorne’s (Managing Director, Cambashi Ltd.) assessment of this new solution.

And don’t forget to take a look at the NX CAM – SINUMERIK Advantage which allows you to get a post processor for the SINUMERIK 840D controller for free.

At recent the PLM Connection in Europe I attended an excellent presentation and demonstration by Andrea Nagler from BSH (Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH) about their global engineering collaboration and supplier integration project. BSH is in 13 countries and have 42 factories with 38,600 employees. Their business challenges as they grew globally were to long delays and effort required to for communication between distributed development teams, increased partners and suppliers and each one using different CAD format taking long cycle time to communicate and collaborate, and getting difficult to get ad-hoc alignment between internal team as well as external partners and suppliers. Their motivation was simple - - improve quality with better and consistent communication, - improve cycle time due to faster access to information, speedy decisions, early start of tolling, less meeting - cost saving due to reduced travel,sample parts, tool changes, and export/import procedures. They have 900 Teamcenter high-end users, 1500 low-end users, and 200 external partners. She talked about how they plan to use Teamcenter Community, Microsoft Share Point based, collaboration solution that is integrated with Teamcenter PLM for visual collaboration and supplier integration, using: - Teamcenter Community as a web based portal for internal teams and external partners and suppliers. - Virtual project rooms for sharing and administration of projects - Application sharing - Visual conferencing based on JT. Andrea then did a live demo of the collaboration project using Teamcenter Community and Teamcenter with her team in Berlin!!! That was quite amazing. Together they demoed a live visual conference collaborating on a spring design for a coffee maker. They showed power of visual collaboration, and visual issue management.

I was catching up with my social production feeds in Google Reader last night and ran across a report from Grant Thornton International from September (via Mass Customization and Open Innovation). I usually see these things pretty quickly after they come out, so not sure how this one slipped passed me for so long.

I dove right in (its a quick read and worth the time) and was surprised by the magnitude if not necessarily the direction of some of the responses in the survey the report was based on. Specifically the fact that most companies believe that the overall number one source of the best innovative ideas is customers, followed by heads of business units and general employees. In AP, nearly 50% of companies surveyed felt that customers topped the list. Open innovation is certainly not a new concept, but most discussions center on getting ideas from an extended supply chain or partners, not from end user customers them selves. When companies started to look beyond their four walls for ideas to their partner networks it was a somewhat natural evolution of what they had already been doing. The move to engaging customers in the open innovation process is potentially revolutionary.

The most obvious revolutionary aspect is the number of connections and relationships that will have to be maintained. When practicing open innovation with the supply chain, intellectual property and collaboration have to be maintained with a handful of entities that likely already have tools and established connections with the lead firm. When practicing it with customers, the number of connections increases exponentially and its more than likely that they won't have tools more advanced than a word processor and web browser to capture and express those ideas.

Perhaps a less obvious revolutionary aspect is the change in the balance of power between customer and company that this move will cause. Customers already have a tremendous amount of power in most vendor relationships since their is so much competition in most markets. However, once companies actually begin to depend on their customers as the prime source of their innovative ideas, then the final stage of dependency may bee reached since at that point customers will control the inputs (innovative ideas) and the results (the cash companies get for selling those innovative ideas bundled into products and services). The role of a company will have to fundamentally change when (if?) this model takes hold. It will have to view itself as a facilitator rather than a producer. The firm that has the best way for customers to flesh out and communicate their ideas, the shortest time from receiving a new idea to producing a product or service that incorporates that idea and the best reputation for respecting customer provided intellectual property will be the winner.

It's clear from this study that business leaders see where things are going and are looking for the customer to step up and provide more of their innovative ideas. The question is do they know where that path will lead them?

At this year's EMO in Milan, Italy, more than 1,500 machine tool builders exhibited their new innovations. Siemens provided several innovations for these machine tool builders and their customers. Helmuth Ludwig talks about these innovations and how motion control and PLM specialists merge the virtual and real world.

For more information about these solutions, just visit the machinery and industrial products solution homepage and the virtual machine tool homepage.

In case you missed the posts from PLM Connection Europe, here is a recap of some our social media activity. Our blog team for this event is pictured above: Markus, moi and Nik. Combined, we posted quite a few highlights. They include some customer interviews and Q&A with some of our development folks.

Check out our videos on the YouTube event playlist. See photos from the event on Flickr. There are also a few presentations noted in our blog posts on Slideshare.

Read more on these blog posts:

• PLM Connection: NX CAM – SINUMERIK Advantage
• PLM Connection: Simulation Use Cases by MAYA
• PLM Connection: Swiss Perspectives
• PLM Connection: SOMFY on Teamcenter Unified Architecture Implementation
• PLM Connection: PLM Europe Chair Recaps the Event
• PLM Connection: Shape Searching With Geolus
• PLM Connection: Steve Bashada on Teamcenter Customer Conversations
• PLM Connection: Max Bögl on Building Lifecycle Management
• PLM Connection: Integrated CAM and Close-to-Reality Simulation
• PLM Connection: Rolls-Royce Connecting Top Floor and Shop Floor
• PLM Connection: NX Issues Management
• PLM Connection: NX Synchronous Technology
• PLM Connection: NX HD3D Visual Reporting
• PLM Connection: Does Teamcenter and Tecnomatix Work Together?
• PLM Connection: ASML Handles Large Assemblies
• PLM Connection: Extending Teamcenter Capabilities into Techincal Publications
• PLM Connection Europe: The road to 2007 UA (from V9.1)
• PLM Connection Europe: PLM Journey at Rolls-Royce
• PLM Connection: Bridging Planning and Production with Quality
• PLM Connection: 25-Year Attendee Rik Voels
• PLM Connection: KeyOx ID & Mechanical Design
• PLM Connection: More Assembly Planning and BIW on Teamcenter
• PLM Connection: All about Material Flow Optimization
• PLM Connection: Quality Everywhere
• PLM Connection: More about Tecnomatix Driving Productivity
• PLM Connection: Assembly Planning using Teamcenter
• PLM Connection Europe: Philips Lighting Global Engineering
• PLM Connection: KHBO Simulation Project
• PLM Connection: Teamcenter
• PLM Connection: Increasing Part Manufacturing Productivity
• PLM Connection: Astronaut Hans Schlegel Keynote
• PLM Connection Europe Kicks Off
• Reporting from PLM Connection at EMEA
• Roving Reporting at PLM Connection EMEA

We encourage your feedback on what you like or don’t - and what you’d like to see more of in the future. FYI, in case you subscribe to RSS, just a reminder you can add our feed to your RSS reader – or simply add to the RSS folder in your e-mail program. You may also want to follow us on Twitter for our latest 140-character comments.

Siemens merges the virtual and physical worlds … and you are getting it for free.

The integrative part is the post processor which connects the NX CAM system with the SINUMERIK controller of your machine tool. It allows you to create specific G-code for your SINUMERIK controller. Take a look at my previous post about the Virtual Machine Tool for more details about this technology.

Andreas Saar, head of the Tecnomatix part manufacturing solution group, talks about the NX CAM – SINUMERIK advantage program and the benefits for our customers.

You can apply for the NX CAM – SINUMERIK advantage program by visiting this dedicated web page.

The buzz in the social media scene the last couple weeks has been Google Wave. This is a new technology coming out from Google that essentially reinvents email. Whether this is the best thing since email itself or just the next in a line of overhyped new technologies is still to be seen.

You can follow the like above for a long video on Google Wave or watch this far simpler version:


For me, I’m seeing enough good ideas here to at least start talking about it. For those of us working in product design, the potential for collaboration is probably the biggest. Right now Google Wave access is limited (you can request an account here) but the hand full of CAD people that have got access quickly found each other and quickly begin...well, collaborating.



The CAD wave above is one example. This is a public wave that has grown and morphed over the last week. The simple question… how might Google Wave be used in Product Design? I’ve seen a few more private, semi-private and public waves around CAD get started too. I’ll post more about them later as the landscape becomes more clear.

Another interesting aspect of Google Wave is that it is more of a framework than an application. Others can easily extend it into other domains via Gadgets, Robots, and hosting of the wave. Will we be seeing CAD based extensions? Time will tell.

BTW, Josh Mings is using Google Wave for an upcoming article on Google Wave (kind of clever). Be sure to check out Develop3D for more to this story. I suspect we will be seeing quite a few PLM articles and blog posts on this technology.

P.S. Hey Google, how about some invites for more CAD and design folks? We have collaboration to do!