The Siemens PLM Analyst Event was held in Boston last week, and it was marked by an impressive array of product and technology demos, along with some very compelling customer presentations.
Siemens Industry Automation CEO, Anton Huber, kicked off the event by presenting the Division’s organizational structure and business results for the past year. Mr. Huber reported orders and sales were up by over 17 percent for the first half of 2008. He pointed to the successful integration of Siemens PLM in three key areas: People and Processes, a Go to Market and Customer strategy, and Products & Technology. Mr. Huber also highlighted the considerable progress and advancement of the Archimedes Project, a formidable undertaking announced a year ago to integrate Siemens Automation with the extensive PLM solution set of UGS.
The Archimedes project focuses on five major business and technology initiatives: Engineering for the Digital Factory (E4DF, formerly Adaptive Manufacturing), Virtual Commissioning, Hi-Fi Machining, Harmonized Lifecycles, and Mechatronics. Huber explained that Siemens PLM prioritized three of these initiatives in order to leverage many of the existing Siemens Automation products and to meet the most immediate needs of their customers. These were E4DF, Hi-Fi Machining, and Harmonized Lifecycles, and these were the subject matter for much of the event’s presentations. Mr. Huber made reference to the Siemens vision of the Unified Product & Production Platform that is now being deployed. This platform spans all the enterprise business domains, from SRM, SCM, ERP, to Services and CRM, and completes with Product and Product Lifecycles.
Tony Affuso, Chairman & CEO of Siemens PLM Software, presented a one-year-later integration update and the vision going forward. Under the Siemens PLM Software management team, the head count has grown to 8,300. Affuso pointed out the progress that has been made in the transition from the physical to the virtual factory, and how virtual simulation is significantly improving the process of implementing production systems, time-to-product launch, and reducing the cost of getting products to market. Affuso focused on the strong end-to-end PLM solution offerings of NX for CAD/CAM/CAE, Teamcenter for collaborative product and process, Tecnomatix for Digital Manufacturing, and the Velocity series for mid-market PLM. It should be noted that despite a year of integration of people, products and processes, new product development, and overall transition, Siemens PLM grew revenues across its product portfolio by around 15 percent.
Chuck Grindstaff, EVP for Product Development, presented an overview of the progress that has been made with Project Archimedes, emphasizing the Siemens PLM vision of end-to-end PLM from concept to automation and production. This vision involved the complete integration of the digital product with the digital production process, virtualizing all aspects of the design/build process. Grindstaff focused on the three areas of Archimedes that Siemens PLM had concentrated on: E4DF, Hi-Fi Machining, and Harmonized Lifecycle, and introduced the Siemens people who would detail these initiatives.
Dr. Michael Weyrich, of the Drives Technology Division and Motion Control Systems, presented the latest developments in the area of Hi-Fi Machining which involved integration of CAM-NC and CNC simulation. In his presentation, Dr. Weyrich demonstrated how they had combined virtual machine tool simulation with real machine controller simulation to effectively create a virtual machine tool that realistically simulated the entire production process of parts machining. In the presentation, Dr. Weyrich showed how Siemens PLM collaborated with their machine tool OEM customer, Index, to virtually simulate their machine tool. Moreover, this was an integration of NX CAM geometry and the Sinumerik CNC controller to virtually integrate the world of CAM and CNC that enables the manufacturer to virtually emulate all the characteristics, features, and nuances of the machining process before the part is physically produced.
Dr. Wolfgang Schloegl, Project Manager for Digital Engineering, presented a look at the work Siemens PLM has done in the area of Digital Manufacturing and Virtual Commissioning. Schloegl examined some of the shortcomings found in manufacturing engineering processes used today, and the lack of coordination between electrical, mechanical, and controls engineering in the design and implementation of production systems. With E4DF, Siemens PLM is seeking to optimize and streamline this process through parallel and synchronized engineering workflows, enabling virtual commissioning and validation of production systems through a common engineering Teamcenter backbone. Siemens PLM has also rolled out the Simatic Automation Designer, an automation platform that enables production line design and simulation along with controls visualization and simulation, electrical circuits design and layout that will produce PLC logic and HMI programs. The Simatic Automation Designer is an integration of Siemens technology and Tecnomatix Process Designer/Simulation.
Giorgio Cuttica, General Manager, Siemens MES, covered the Harmonized Lifecycle aspect of Archimedes with a look at an extended PLM lifecycle for the CPG and Food & Beverage industries. Cuttica pointed out how CPG companies are adopting and implementing PLM solutions to address the need to cover the entire lifecycle of their products, from concept to production. Siemens PLM intends to deliver a PLM solution for the CPG industry that enables them to “Deliver the Brand” and to provide a unified product and production platform that helps their customers bring product to market from concept, consumer research, through product development, packaging, production, to consumer experience. This effort in Harmonized Lifecycles combined solutions and technologies from Teamcenter and the Simatic IT R&D suite.
Siemens PLM brought one of their CPG customers, Unilever, to present their adoption and implementation strategy for PLM. Huw Evans, R&D Information Director, presented an overview of Unilever’s PLM direction. Evans pointed out that innovation was a very important business driver for the CPG industry and Unilever, and that PLM solutions provided a platform to manage their product from concept and development through production to distribution and de-listing. Unilever sees the need to join up all product information organizationally and geographically across the entire product lifecycle. Unilever uses Siemens PLM solution for specification management, integration with ERP, and NX (CAD) for package design.
The event included presentations by Siemens PLM customers, Nissan Motors of Japan, National Steel Car from Canada, Renishaw Instruments from the UK, Waltonen Engineering from the US, and Pari Robotics from India. Each company focused on the value of Siemens PLM product design tools like NX, and collaborative PDM environment of Teamcenter.
The NX6 launch was covered by Paul Brown and Eric Sterling of Siemens PLM and was clearly focused on the new Synchronous Technology which represented what Siemens PLM referred to as Design Freedom and History Free CAD design. Brown noted that the NX6 Synchronous Technology was differentiated from other history-free CAD design applications in that it addressed all three of the areas of Design Freedom: a Feature Recognition Engine, Constraint Management, and Direct Editing. The message was that for a company to capture ideas and innovate efficiently, effectively and competitively, they needed design tools like NX. The demos of NX6 with Synchronous Technology illustrated high degrees of flexibility, reuse, and compatibility with non-NX models, and would appear to provide a design engineer with a tool that enables faster and more intuitive design within an environment for knowledge capture and reuse.
Steve Bashada, VP Teamcenter, provided a look at the current market position of Teamcenter 2007 and a sneak peek at Teamcenter 8. Currently, Teamcenter enjoys a market presence of over 4 million licenses (seats) and dominates the PDM market space. The overall Siemens PLM Unified Product and Production Platform is based on the Teamcenter Backbone of lifecycle data and process architecture. Clearly, Teamcenter will be the key to enabling data integration and enterprise collaboration across all domains of the Siemens PLM solution set. Teamcenter 8 (Siemens PLM is dropping the date designation) adds significant new functionality to ten areas of Teamcenter 2007. The four new areas include: Content & Document Management, Formulation & Recipe Management (to address the CPG and F&G sectors), Reporting & Analytics, and Community Collaboration. After Teamcenter 8.0’s release in November 2008, Teamcenter 8.1 will follow a year later in 2009 and 9.0 in 2010. After these releases Teamcenter will remain stable (for additional versions) for an unspecified period. The one area that Teamcenter doesn’t specifically address is Digital Rights Management, but Bashada indicated that Siemens PLM is working with Microsoft in this area.
Alain Lung and Larry Bemis presented the Tecnomatix Update and Direction which represents Siemens PLM Digital Manufacturing solution set. The Siemens’ vision for Digital Manufacturing is to provide industry-based enterprise solutions authoring, optimizing, and managing manufacturing data and processes from top floor to shop floor. In essence, they want to provide a Digital Manufacturing platform that integrates product design, manufacturing process design and simulation, shop floor execution systems, commissioning, and quality assurance. The Tecnomatix solution set includes Part Planning & Validation, Assembly Planning, Robotic & Automation Planning, Plant Design & Optimization, Quality Management, and Production Management. The Simatic Automation Designer is now integrated with the Tecnomatix solution set, and it now allows for a complete end-to-end manufacturing process to automation solution.
One customer story of note was the presentation by Dr. Oliver Riedel of Volkswagen AG. VW’s overall intent was to commonize their global design/build operations on a single PDM system. They recognized the rapidly increasing complexity and variety of their products, processes, and manufacturing plants. For VW to reach their goal of becoming the world’s largest automotive manufacturer by 2018, they need to adopt a collaborative product, process, and manufacturing information system that could not only deal with their vision and growth, but also interface and manage their very large installed base of legacy systems. After a short but comprehensive solution evaluation process, they selected Teamcenter as their collaborative PDM platform. The acquisition of UGS by Siemens Industrial Automation had a significant role in determining VW’s decision on Teamcenter. Some of the lessons learned pointed out by Dr. Riedel were to look for cross-industry best practices, validate the solutions with your own real data in well planned benchmarks, while keeping an eye on the big picture.
One of Siemens PLM overall challenges over the last year was to execute their plan and integrate the Siemens Automation products and solutions with the UGS PLM solution set. Additionally, they faced the challenge of articulating their vision, intent, message, and plan to the manufacturing community. At this juncture, it is clear that they have made significant progress toward executing their vision as well as changing the design/build/automate landscape for good. The 2008 Analyst Event served to showcase much of their accomplishments to date and reiterate their vision going forward.