Teamcenter

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, and validation. It can be extended to include downstream processes like planning, production, procurement, service, etc.

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

Teamcenter is used by almost all departments in business for various purposes. Engineering or R&D uses it to create, change, and release product design definitions like 2D, 3D, BOM, and 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), and also integrate with their sales tool to get automatic drawings, and 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, and instructions, and update them 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 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, and storage.

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

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

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

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

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 it properly and make full use of it.

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.