PLM Integration – reaching out beyond the borders of Teamcenter

There is a reason Teamcenter is becoming ever more powerful, with lots of functionality added into the latest release: the need to integrate business processes more and more is unstoppable. Teamcenter clearly, and wisely, focuses on supporting the needs of those working in various stages of a product's lifecycle. To be fair, there is a lot to be gained by just leveraging what is available within Teamcenter, and really applying all of the capabilities of Teamcenter as an integrated platform of product and process knowledge.

But there is also something going on beyond the borders of Teamcenter in areas that we engineers often don't want to be bothered with, such as order processing, inventory management, or controlling.  Making changes in orders for engineered products visible to product development, or transferring a BOM quickly and accurately to the shop floor for production, is a lot easier if the business systems that drive or need such information, such as ERP, are well integrated with Teamcenter.

The number of companies who are realizing this, and are trying to build a network of business systems and applications that are integrated in an intelligent way, is growing fast. So, how should Teamcenter be connected to the 'outside' world ?

There is more than one answer. At a technical level, an integration should match the expectations for functionality, reliability, and performance. If dynamic business processes or application landscapes require lots of changes, the integration should also lend itself to fast modification. For fast deployment, templates should be available that can be reused. There are various technologies and complete integration solutions available which have their strengths and weaknesses, and these will be discussed in detail at the upcoming UGS Connection 2008.

Probably more important than the technical aspect of an integration are the processes that an integration should support. Before anything can be built or deployed it needs to be clear how data should flow, e.g. for a product release process it needs to be defined what kind of information out of the rich set of engineering data is actually needed at release time by non-engineering users, how that data is kept current in case of a product change, who needs to be notified, etc. These processes of course are in turn driven by people.

Now, if an engineering system such as Teamcenter is to be linked to a business system such as SAP or Oracle Manufacturing, all of a sudden people will need to sit together and agree on some aspects of their day to day work that affect all of them. Especially for a large organization this can be a challenging and lengthy process because in many cases the persons involved do not quite speak the same language and have very different goals.

From our own experience, if there is a single piece of advice that should be given to those considering an integration of Teamcenter with other software systems, it is this: Start by bringing the people together that are working with all of those systems both as users as well as administrators, as early as possible. Once everybody is on board regarding the goals of such an integration, building the integrated process and data flows and deploying them in a way that they are actually seen as beneficial to the daily work of the people involved is a whole lot easier. Of course, the integration tool that is being put in place needs to support all of the desired functionality, but this is no longer a major constraint in many cases.

There is a lot more to be said about what can and should be done, or be avoided, to make an integration project successful. The PLM World Integration Focus Group has been set up to discuss such issues. I hope that there will be a lively discussion of the benefits and challenges of integration during UGS Connection 2008.

Mathias Mond
TESIS PLMware
mathias.mond@tesis.de