Siemens Teamcenter facilitates communication between people in product designs throughout organizations where the electrical and mechanical engineers are often hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles apart.
Unfortunately, sharing and aligning the overwhelming amount of designs can be unmanageable, making this simple task risky to any collaborative project. But good news, electrical ECAD MCAD collaboration using PLM can make the process no longer a headache.
Corporations with multiple activities and domains are looking for their single source of truth that can be lost in the remote communications of a global company. Therefore, there is a need for a single system that supports ECAD MCAD collaboration, including the work in progress designs, changes, final output, and documentations.
Siemens Teamcenter PLM
ECAD MCAD Collaboration
Teamcenter is the solution for collaborating designs between ECAD and MCAD products. It is capable of delivering a unique arrangement of designs eliminating the misalignment in the design lifecycle process.
By managing the electrical harness designs that represent the Electrical CAD and Mechanical CAD, Teamcenter then takes the designs through a seamless life cycle from inception to manufacturing.
Teamcenter communicates with Capital and NX
The video below walks you through how Teamcenter seamlessly works to align electrical ECAD MCAD collaboration. The video starts with an electrical engineer who wants to create a logical design from the electrical subsystem. The electrical engineer sends the design through Teamcenter to control the flow of information to the mechanical harness. This is happening while the mechanical engineer is concurrently developing the packaging space of the harness in the product context.
The mechanical engineer modifies the MCAD model in Siemens NX to accommodate physical connectivity to devices or other harnesses in the product platform. The mechanical engineer communicates the modification and limitations back in Teamcenter. The electrical engineer then receives the modifications through the change manager in the capital harness and decides to update the harness drawing in the capital harness.
This process improves the communications between the electrical and the mechanical engineers using the Teamcenter integrations and solves the problem of wrong designs that leads to manufacturing an incompatible product (harness).Teamcenter seamlessly works to align electrical ECAD MCAD collaboration
Electrical and Mechanical Design Management Integration
ECAD MCAD collaboration across the globe can be unmanageable, increasing the risk level of any collaborative project. Teamcenter manages the flow of designs and the links of those designs effortlessly. It doesn’t matter whether they are electrical or mechanical representations. Teamcenter works with any analysis and has a single source of truth. As a result, you will never need to worry about working in a remote or global environment within your organization or in the customer-vendor relationship.
Siemens Teamcenter Product Cost Management supports cost engineering in designing and implementing specifications at the lowest total cost of ownership, and lowest carbon emission, and in balancing the design with the costs of procurement, manufacturing, and assembly. With the provided robust database, benchmark data, and analytic capabilities, product and tool costs can be calculated with near-surgical precision.
With Teamcenter Product Cost Management version 9.3, we have further expanded our capabilities enabling customers to benefit from the latest innovations. With the following, I’d like to share with you some of the main improvements.
Siemens Teamcenter : Optimizing product, and carbon emission strategies through environmental and economic transparency
The carbon footprint calculator for Siemens Teamcenter Product Cost Management 9.3 provides the opportunity for cost engineers to calculate carbon emission along with their cost calculations. Teamcenter Product Cost Management supports the calculation of emissions for energy usage in production systems, calculation of emissions based on used raw materials, purchased parts, and material compositions. This is then rolled up the assembly tree for a result.
Calculation of carbon emissions for a door panel switch
The carbon footprint calculator is aimed to be used at the early stages of the product life cycle within the development process, and not after the start of production where typically legacy systems take the lead from then onwards. The emission factors are hosted in the multidimensional master data (with dimensions like region, customer, supplier, date, or any other), and the solution looks up the best value for the end-user depending on the calculation parameters. The final goal is to allow cost engineers to manage a full roll-up, for both, cost and carbon footprint predictions. Teamcenter Product Cost Management supports you in analyzing the cost and environmental footprint of a product at each stage of the development process which provides greater transparency, enables smarter trade-offs, and informs stronger CO2-emission strategies.
Accurate “should cost” calculations with improved and extended knowledge database
We continuously update our location database with the latest actuals for wages and labor burden, prices for natural gas and electricity, rental costs, and interest rates. With version 9.3, 65 countries and a total of 543 regions within the Americas, APAC, and EMEA with new global location data are available. We also implemented an “overview at a glance” for selected countries which provides insight into our research methodology. The machine data content is enhanced frequently. There are also new rubber injection molding machines added to the database.
Updated global production site and machine data
Extend global reference data by material prices and overhead rates
The key factors for successful “should costing” are the right material prices and overhead rates. Therefore, there is a new full-fledged global reference data module that includes raw material prices and industry average overhead rates.
In version 9.3, there are 10,000 ferrous, nonferrous, and plastic materials. The material prices and overhead data consist of more than 10,000 standard material prices for major standards of materials.
Extend Global Reference Data by Material PricesMaterial Classification and Material Details
Furthermore, overhead reference data newly contains material overhead cost (MOC); residual manufacturing overhead costs (RMOC); sales, and general administration costs (G&A); research, and development cost overheads (R&D) from more than 65 countries. Customers that are dependent on the automotive industry will receive insights into automotive industry-specific material prices and overhead rates that are segmented on region level.
Extend Global Reference Data by Overhead RatesResidual Manufacturing Overheads
Updates are made 1-2 times per year on reference data: production sites, substance, machines, overheads, and knowledge domain processes data. On the new material prices data, the updates are provided 4 times per year.
Try to imagine doing this on your own… What will be the cost be? How many opportunities would you be missing out on? With the value provided by Teamcenter Product Cost Management 9.3, you can save time and money by leading the research on your own and completing “should cost” calculations much faster.
Precise quotes by supporting custom list-properties in project assumptions during multi-year lifetime calculation
With version 9.3, you can select for every item in the project assumptions custom list properties that are used in lifetime calculation. This capability provides you an extra dimension in quotation and control of prices used in the lifetime calculation. More precise quotes are provided since project-specific custom list properties can be selected for material, cost factors, and exchange rates.
Quick quotation solution for toolmakers as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering
The NX Mold Connect application (available October 1st) is a cloud-native collaboration platform for designers and mold makers to facilitate injection molded part manufacturing by design validation and cost estimation. Within the SaaS solution NX Mold Connect, you can execute different designs for manufacturing analysis. You can also perform feature recognition analysis like NX Feature2Cost. With the analysis of the part, ribs, undercuts, and openings will then be determined. These values can be used for a quotation in Teamcenter Tool Costing.
Further improved and new capabilities in Teamcenter Product Cost Management
Teamcenter includes further enhancements and new capabilities to support improved usability and increased performance, such as automatic saving of the table configuration on the user level, new master data documents in the new user interface, and much more.
With the new updates, you can balance emissions with cost impact across the entire product portfolio. Further, you can lead short and long-term cost and carbon footprint scenario planning by monitoring product-cost impact over time, including market dynamics.
Siemens Teamcenter offers one of the best and most comprehensive change management capabilities in the business, no matter your organizational change management strategy. Engineering change management is one of the foundational building blocks of any PLM solution.
Using CMII certified change process, Teamcenter customers get the benefits of leveraging industry-standard best practices to track, process, report, and audit changes. Engineering changes can impact product characteristics, result in expensive tooling changes, delay program timelines, and even disrupt production activities if not handled carefully. Hence a formal, multi-step change process is much needed when handling high-impact engineering changes, and Teamcenter fully supports this with the necessary rigor.
Common Engineering Change Management Questions
What if the change is simple, but you need to track it?
What if you need to inform stakeholders of the minimal change?
What if the clock is ticking, and you need to process the change and get it out the door quickly?
While there is no right or wrong answer to the above questions, it starts pointing us to a more fundamental question – Should all changes be treated equally? I hope the answer is a resounding NO.
Look at the picture below and guess which of these changes would require the rigor and discipline of a formal change process versus ones that you would consider to be a simple change.
If you answered 1 and 3 require a formal change while 2 and 4 are candidates for simple change, you are correct. So, if changes come in different shapes and sizes, shouldn’t the change processes follow suit?
Introducing… Simple Change in Teamcenter
Siemens Teamcenter : Improve Accuracy and Productivity with Simple Change
Simple change is ideal when you want to quickly yet formally track and process a change with minimal participants. It leverages the strengths of our core change management capabilities while simplifying them to quickly and efficiently process simple changes.
If this sounds like something you can use to streamline your business processes and improve your productivity, please reach out to your sales contact to learn more about this capability.
Siemens NX Validation tools have always made sure that part quality and initiatives remain perfect and without error. With the introduction of a few new tools we’ve extended the capabilities you know and love with our validation tools.
The problems associated with drawing and CAD model validation can be broken into three broad areas—productivity, quality (product and CAD model), and process management.
NX can similarly validate requirements stored outside the CAD design in Excel spreadsheets or XML files. We refer to this capability as Requirements-Driven Design Validation, or RDDV.
Siemens NX Validation Improvements:
Quality Dashboard for Check-Mate
NX/Open checkers improvements
Provide availability of HD3D objects for diagramming applications
Please read on to find out more and be sure to check out our video demonstration on these updates.
Quality Dashboard
The new quality dashboard for check-mate replaces the Java Qdashboard. This is an on premise tool providing the ability to quickly summarize checker results and display them in a variety of graphs and charts,
What’s included?
Out of the box summary reports
Ability to create custom reports
Results per part file or checker
Very fast search and population of data
NX/Open support added for Check-Mate Checkers
Check-mate checkers can be created using NX/Open in all supported coding languages.
What’s included?
•Custom Checkers can be written with all major Check-Mate functions: Set Up, Customize, Execute, Documentation, Save Results, Smart checking and batch mode •All checker results are available in HD3D and can be saved into Teamcenter
HD3D Visual Tag Support for Diagramming Tools
HD3D framework enables assigning pointers to tags which provide visual cues indicating important information. This information is available and can be browsed.
What’s included?
•Made this capability available to diagramming applications such as: P&ID Designer, and Automation designer •Allows these applications to convey and persist results providing users with better information about their design thus leading to improved quality and reduced time spent doing manual reviews
NX Drafting provides a comprehensive set of tools to produce and maintain engineering drawings which comply to major national and international drafting standards.
•A single source of dimensional and tolerance information •Fully associative annotations •More efficient downstream processes
What we’ll cover in this blog with NX Drafting: Modernizing text entry for usability and familiarity with widely-used Microsoft Office functionality and workflows. •Dynamic Text Editor •Note General Context Tab •Text Shortcut Toolbar •Embedded Annotations •Origin Alignment
NX Layout
An easy-to-use 2D conceptual design solution which helps you leverage a familiar 2D environment with dedicated support tools.
•2D Migration •2D Design and Layout •Associative 2D to 3D capabilities
What we’ll cover in this blog with NX Layout: •Improved area fills in shapes for better performance and downstream reuse •Improved large layout performance with 2D active sets
NX Drafting
Improve efficiency by defining the default origin alignment
Definition is now done in “Preferences” or “Customer Defaults”
Origin alignment block: •More than the note command, all annotation commands are supported •Origin alignment, stacking, and positioning of dimensions and annotations •Origin alignment and positioning of tables •Anchor point alignment for all text
A more natural and productive text entry with familiar interaction
Dynamic Text Editor •Enter the text without tags in the text Input box and identical text appears instantly in the graphics window.
Shortcut Toolbar •Quick access to common text formatting features: •Color and font controls •Symbol Palette •Expressions options •“Precision” MB3 option for decimal places •“Replace” MB3 option to change existing
Improved efficiency with context tab and embedded annotations
Context tab: On create or edit of a note, the Note General context tab gives access to: •Common text formatting options •Insert and export text to or from an external text file •Text alignment and other common settings
Embedded annotations: •Replaces the symbols block from the note command •Add feature control frames, datum feature symbols, and custom symbols •Launches annotation specific UI to build desired annotation to embed into the note •Quickly add attributes and expressions
Click for a demonstration on the above
NX Layout
Better performance and downstream reuse with improved area fills
Previously, area fills were generated from very small crosshatch patterns.
Changed to a true solid area fill:
•Smaller file size, more responsive, and better performance
Maximize performance of larger, complex layouts
Identify relevant curves for finding relations between other 2D components or sketch geometry.
2D active sets: •Relation finding is a key feature of the new sketcher •Active sets are stored in the definition of the 2D component and flows down to all instances •De-emphasizes the 2D Component curves that are not a part of the active set
