Teamcenter Services

Teamcenter is a comprehensive PLM software from Siemens that helps in all stages of product life from Concept to Retirement.

It provides a modern and adaptable platform to capture and execute the product development processes like requirements, design, validation. It can be extended to include downstream processes like planning, production, procurement, service, etc.

Teamcenter along with ERP system can be the two most essential executive systems within your company.

Teamcenter has many benefits or usages. Some of them are mentioned below.

Increase efficiency in product development by reducing the time taken for data retrieval, search, storage.

Reduce costs by increasing part usage, reducing rework by giving accurate single source of up to date information.

Providing a system to manage complex processes and ensure compliance to it by providing tools like notifications, worklist, workflows, etc.

Increase sales by making it possible to provide product configuration capabilities and reducing lead times and reducing the cost of development.

Reducing costs through effective change management. Make it possible to manage complex products and processes.

Structure Manager is a module to create and manage Bill of Materials in Teamcenter.

It also provides a lot of functionalities apart from BOM management like 3D visualization, variants and options, view related files, BOM compares, Redlining, BOM reports, and many more.

Teamcenter is used by almost all departments in business for various purposes. Engineering or R&D use it to create, change, release product design definitions like 2D, 3D, BOM, how-to instructions. etc.

The planning department can use it to plan production or procurement based on parts and assemblies released by R&D.

Sales can use it to create customer-specific orders (Sales order or BOM), also integrate with their sales tool to get automatic drawings, technical specs for quotations or bids.

Production can use it to create M-BOM (Manufacturing BOM) from E-BOM (Engineering BOM) and also access the latest drawings, instructions, and changes.

Procurement can use it to access the latest drawings and changes and interact with suppliers directly using the supplier collaboration module.

Service can use it to get As-Built to see what product is delivered. They can maintain an AS-MAINTAINED BOM in Teamcenter to know what exact configuration exists at customer place and help them to serve better and sell spare parts. They can create CUSTOMER-BOM to match service manuals, instructions, and update digitally. All these have huge benefits of doing in one single system rather than doing in different non-connected systems.

All the world-leading companies use PLM software to optimize their costs and increase revenues.

Teamcenter Rapid Start is a lighter version of Teamcenter for organizations that need to quickly enable PDM benefits.

Typically it has good CAD integration with leading CAD software and helps with design data management.

Unfortunately, Teamcenter’s price is quote-based and varies depending on which product modules you choose.

Vendors have made it non-transparent and complicated, sorry to say. Cost depends on the modules and packages you choose.

The license could be perpetual, meaning you own it forever or subscription-based (pay per year).

In a perpetual license, you pay a fixed cost per number of licenses and you pay an annual maintenance cost for getting new product updates and features.

Considering everything, for just guidance, we can assume that the typical perpetual license cost could be over 400 USD per user per year for basic PLM modules.

PLM Software is costly, and many companies are spending millions per year on annual maintenance making it even more important to implement properly and make full use of it.

Preferences are like settings in Teamcenter. You can turn ON or OFF certain functionalities like advanced logs or you can choose between options like the location of logs etc.

This makes Teamcenter much more flexible to use. Preferences can be set for user, group, or site level.

It is an old platform for Teamcenter. Siemens moved to the Unified platform around 2007.

Before that, it had Teamcenter Enterprise and Teamcenter Engineering as two platforms.

Item is like a container for a particular part that defines properties that do not change from revision to revision such as part number, part name, etc.

The item itself does not participate in the process and it’s always the Item revision which we work with and associate files to it.

Teamcenter by default creates one Item revision when we create an Item.

The data model is a term used to describe the basic framework of Teamcenter. Teamcenter is flexible and can be changed/configured according to customer requirements.

For example, a customer might need the first revision to start with 1 instead of A or numbering to start with B001, etc.

The data model takes care of this basic architecture. BMIDE is used to configure most of the data model along with preferences.

The data model is very important as it is difficult to change it once data is populated. Example Teamcenter does not allow to delete attributes if there are items using it. There could be a lot of internal references created in the database for different objects. Hence defining a good data model is crucial.

The data model also plays important role in performance. Not using forms and using attributes on Item revision can help in performance. It also affects usability and nearly all aspects of Teamcenter.

Teamcenter change management provides a comprehensive set of tools to create and manage change in Teamcenter. It is a flexible solution that can be tuned to any process.

Teamcenter uses objects called PR(problem report), CR (Change Request), and CN (Change notice) and Workflows to capture business processes. It provides functionalities like auto-checking, notifications, rules, etc in workflows to make the process effective.

The biggest advantage of change management is traceability. Anyone in the company having access can see what is changed for what, by whom, when, and what is impacted, etc. It saves time in rework and better control over complexity.

A dataset in Teamcenter is nothing but anything which has a file associated with it. It can be a CAD dataset having a 2D drawing or 3D model. It can be an instruction having a word or PDF file.

It can be a ppt, Xls, text, or any other format. Dataset can also be empty with no file for placeholder or other purposes. One or more datasets describe or specify the item revision.

These datasets are checked during release and froze after release.

Access Manager is a dedicated module in Teamcenter to define and manage accesses based on users, roles, groups, locations, and Projects.

It is highly flexible and provides the opportunity to configure according to business needs. It can evolve over time as the need arises from simple to complex rules.

A simple Example is the Designer or Author role can have access to all data while the Basic user can only view data.

Teamcenter can have multiple revisions of an item and there can be different status on revision like working, released, preliminary, expired, etc.

The revision rule helps to view a bill of material from a different perspective. For example, a working revision rule shows all the latest working revisions in a bill of material,- Revision rules can be custom made like showing the latest released revisions first, and if not exists then show working or by date or by other rules.

Generally, the design department uses the latest working view while manufacturing might want to see the latest released only.

Teamcenter can be accessed using the number of different clients. Most common is the rich client which gives all the functionalities. Depending on your setup it can be 4 tier client or 2 tier client.

TC also provides a web client called Active workspace which works on any browser and can be used for many functionalities including accessing CAD data.

There are also web clients, thin clients available with some versions of Teamcenter.

Teamcenter provides an interface framework for connecting to any ERP system caller T4Ea or T4E.

Teamcenter also provides one of the best PLM-ERP interface available for any business called Teamcenter for SAP (T4S) integration.

It provides functionality to transfer data bi-directionally as well as view data in each other’ system. Teamcenter and SAP together can provide all the data and process background for any company.

Teamcenter X is a modern cloud-based SaaS PLM platform from Siemens. Teamcenter X has all the functionalities which the traditional Teamcenter Unified has but it also has cloud benefits.

It is managed by Siemens and instant up. There is no need to upgrade separately.

The file management System in Teamcenter is a comprehensive mechanism to create, retrieve, and store files in a secured and fast way in Teamcenter.

It has two major components Server-side and Client-Side. On the server-side, there exist one or more services that manage one or more volumes (vault or folders). There is also a cache on the server-side.

Client-side there is a local client cache and process which helps check the latest version of the file and make it available to the client.

There could be various ways the FMS can be set up depending on locations, number of users, environment, etc.

Teamcenter provides integration with and supports a lot of CAD software like NX, CATIA, CREO, Solidege, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Inventor, and many more.

Teamcenter is very strong on CAD integrations and has 3D visualization at the core of its solution.

Mendix is an Application and extending the domain model we can create an app, build, deploy, and using the app to create, modified to the domain model.

In relation, Teamcenter is a virtual gateway to your company’s product information, connecting all who need to collaborate with product and process knowledge.

Teamcenter Connector for Mendix enables Mendix developers to access product data from Teamcenter or create and modify the product data in Teamcenter.

The Teamcenter Connector built for Mendix creates a wrapper around these SOA

The example includes building a simple Issue / Change Management Tracker for modules in Teamcenter have different entities and their relationship hierarchy

You can by default manage documents in Teamcenter using OOTB item types and functionalities like version control, check-in, check-out, access control, etc.

Teamcenter supports integration with Microsoft office and can work and save documents from MS office directly in TC. You can modify and save BOMs from Excel.

It also has dedicated modules for advanced document management functionalities and also supports third-party tools like Cortona 3D for more advanced authoring for instruction manuals etc.

Teamcenter is one of the world’s most widely used PLM software. There are many channels for help. The official site for Teamcenter is the Siemens GTAC site.

There are a number of other forums, LinkedIn and Facebook groups, Blogs, etc available for help. You can always write to us or book a consultation call with us to get free help on any issues you are facing.