In a global production environment, manufacturers find themselves looking for ways to reduce time-to-market, control costs and manage complexity while maintaining high quality. Factors such as connectivity to manufacturing engineering and production, effectively managing changes, assembly line balancing, forecasting production orders, and more must be considered in the planning and execution phases. Teamcenter Easy Plan, a role-based planning solution, delivers key capabilities to support and execute manufacturing planning.
Easy Plan helps you increase operational efficiency, reduce shop floor errors and maximize your overall engineering productivity. Built on top of the best-in-class Teamcenter® software product lifecycle management (PLM) backbone, Easy Plan helps you leverage existing product and process information, as well as share cross-departmental workflows, so you can optimize your manufacturing bill-of-materials (BOM) and process plan, capture shop floor feedback and manage changes effectively.
Easy Plan works in the Active Workspace client for Teamcenter. Active Workspace is an innovative web-based client platform that simplifies PLM for all users involved in your product lifecycle, accelerates user adoption, and shortens time-to-value by providing a streamlined and intuitive planning experience anytime, anywhere, on any device. Teamcenter is a part of the Xcelerator™ portfolio, a comprehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Easy Plan provides one environment to capture all manufacturing data from different systems and helps you manage global production scenarios. It is well-connected to engineering and execution so that the data and changes can flow seamlessly from one to the other, helping reduce cost and time for new product introduction (NPI). The ability to receive shop floor feedback ensures constant process and quality improvement.
Easy Plan provides a task-based solution to define and manage the manufacturing bill-of-materials (MBOM) and to reconcile any product changes coming in the engineering bill-of-materials (EBOM). Managing the EBOM and MBOM in the same place increases accuracy and reduces inventory costs as changes are implemented easily without delays. Virtual validations can be done to ensure the EBOM’s accuracy. This eliminates purchasing outdated parts or producing previous versions of the product, which frequently happens when the EBOM and MBOM are managed in different environments.
Easy Plan provides optimization tools for improving plant-specific activities with features such as line balancing, cycle time analysis, and station-level walk path estimates. With Easy Plan, accurate production sequence and time analysis of value-added and non-value-added tasks can lead to maximum assembly productivity. Standard time data cards are integrated with Easy Plan for accurate cycle time estimates. What-if scenarios can be defined, executed, and analyzed to ensure the feasibility of assembly processes.
Easy Plan provides a solution to define and manage the bill-of-process (BOP) to improve quality while accelerating NPI by validating process plans much earlier. This eliminates costly, late design changes.
The ability to reuse standardized best practices and adjust them based on plant-level requirements leads to significant cost savings and productivity improvements. For centralized manufacturing planning, this approach overcomes the limitation of working with a subset of programs and product configurations. In this manner, any program can be adapted to reflect actual production scenarios. Easy Plan provides a collaborative environment where factory planners can take the process template defined by the central planning department and adapt it to their local resources and capabilities. This integrated central and factory-level planning approach allows better traceability and change propagation to ensure costs associated with product modifications are minimized.
Easy Plan provides a state-of-the-art solution to author manufacturing work instructions based on the process plan and the manufacturing BOM. It provides an easy-to-use environment to author text instructions with visual aids that are delivered seamlessly to the shop floor for operators to execute the work. Using these electronic work instructions on the shop floor, operators can access the latest information authored in Teamcenter, knowing it is up-to-date and accurate, ensuring good quality during production. They can also use Easy Plan to report back to manufacturing engineering regarding issues found on the shop floor, leveraging the tight connection between manufacturing and execution.
Shop floor users can access the required information offline to work when they are not connected.
Easy Plan provides a state-of-the-art solution to author manufacturing work instructions based on the process plan and the manufacturing BOM. It provides an easy-to-use environment to author text instructions with visual aids that are delivered seamlessly to the shop floor for operators to execute the work.
• Enable intuitive user experience and ease of use for process planning
• Standardize and re-use best practices
• Develop process plans that reflect plant level production scenarios
• Leverage strong configuration and change management for manufacturing data
• Optimize cycle times and production rates
• Provide clear and up-to-date operator instructions
Easy Plan will help you shift your manufacturing planning activities earlier in the product lifecycle, and enable collaboration between manufacturing and design teams, providing early visibility to potential issues. Easy Plan, built on the Teamcenter PLM backbone, supports a digital thread for controlled and consistent data flow between manufacturing execution systems, and design and manufacturing engineering.
The best practice is to assign the engineering assembly as part of the background parts, this reduces the need to update when parts are changed – they get picked up immediately.
Easy Plan uses the Active Workspace client. It provides the same user experience and looks and feel. It is part of the Active Workspace installation, and it is aligned with the Active Workspace release cadence.
Easy Plan is part of the Active Workspace kit (starting AW 5.1) and can be installed through TEM or Deployment Center.
As far as compatibility is concerned, it follows the same compatibility matrix as Active Workspace.
An application is available in Active Workspace for performing CAD-BOM Alignment. Easy Plan for MBOM Management supports creating MBOM using the EBOM which is aligned using the new CBA. We provide a utility to help transition from Design EBOM to the new CBA.
Key benefits:
Yes, until the customer is ready to completely move to Easy Plan, as an intermediate step, our customer can use both clients in parallel. The customer can use MBOM Management in Easy Plan and Process Planner in MPP (RAC) or vice versa, do MBOM Management in MBM (RAC) and Process Planning in Easy Plan as the data model is the same.
We have worked hard to close the gap between the two clients, ensuring Teamcenter Easy Plan is the more mature offering. In fact, there are some features in Easy Plan that are not available in MPP. We encourage our MPP customers to move over to Easy Plan but will continue to support those that are still on MPP. We also encourage selling Teamcenter Easy Plan to all new prospects.
Users will access Deployment Center and will be prompted on the installation to choose one or more of the following options:
For some industries, all solutions could potentially fit, and the decision is based on the Customer’s business process. A customer can also have both solutions in the environment, and use different solutions for different products if needed. Also, preferences can be used to customize the user experience and show tasks to users based on their manufacturing process needs.
Yes. Easy Plan supports multiple industry manufacturing processes and use cases.
There are no plans to sunset MPP, however, we are heavily investing in Teamcenter Easy Plan. Going forward, new solution capabilities will only be available through Easy Plan.
Teamcenter Manufacturing is an umbrella term for Teamcenter Manufacturing Process Planning (MPP) and Teamcenter Easy Plan. MPP is a rich client solution that has been around for a long time, and we have many customers using it today. Consider it the “Swiss Army Knife” of assembly planning with many capabilities in 1 client. The strategic future direction of Teamcenter Manufacturing – is Teamcenter Easy Plan. Easy Plan is a role and task-based, web solution that addresses industry-specific scenarios.
New product enhancements will be delivered on Teamcenter Easy Plan only. We are targeting a gradual replacement of MPP (RAC) functionality with Easy Plan. In the meantime, we will continue to support our MPP customers.
This is not currently on the roadmap; we will keep this in mind for future capability.
EBOM is not mandatory, check the preference EP_WorkPackageContentType
Background parts are added explicitly, it’s not calculated based on what has already been assigned. The plan is also to support Dynamic In-Process Assembly (DIPA) in the future.
Yes, Teamcenter Manufacturing solutions can integrate with AR technology solutions like TeamViewer, and other vendors that are being evaluated as well. AR provides capabilities based on the data authored in Easy Plan.
This is currently planned for a future release.
Yes, we can configure Plant BOP and Classic BOP in EP. Product BOP is on the roadmap.
Easy Plan for MBOM Management and Electronic Work Instructions (EWI) using Active Workspace Visualization. Easy Plan configured for BTO & ETO are using PLMVisWeb with microservice technology. This microservice technology is the go-forward strategy of the company, and in the future, the graphics engine will be replaced by NX. To capture 3D Product Views, Teamcenter Vis can be invoked from Easy Plan.
In MBOM alignment task, the search is based on the AW search in structure (using SOLR indexing for indexed structures). In the planning tasks, search is based on the structure search mechanism only.
Support for composites is on the long-term roadmap.
Easy Plan can support both. Check the preference EP_WorkPackageContentType to define the use of Product BOP, Plant BOP, or Classic BOP for Easy Plan.
IDIC is still used for assignments and assignment indications. In general, for existing capabilities, Easy Plan uses the same data model as MPP to allow an easy transition to the new application.
Yes. Easy Plan shows different assignment indicators to indicate assigned/over-assigned/missing parts. Compare is dynamic and reflects the current status without any user action. Compare criteria are configurable by the administrator.
This is the same as in Active Workspace. Customers can customize the menus and commands, add custom commands and views, etc
Weld points and Manufacturing features are in our long-term roadmap, there is no specific target version for that.
Easy Plan and Active workspace both support Product Configurator in Teamcenter, which is the recommended model for variants.