On September 6, 2007 Mercury Marine hosted a Teamcenter ProEngineer Integration event at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. This event was focused on understanding the road map of the Teamcenter / ProEngineer integration, sneak peek of the Integrated ProEngineer Manager (IPEM) 7.0, and identify, discuss and prioritize issues related to ProEngineer CAD data management in Teamcenter Engineering and JT Tessellation.
This event was attended by 9 different Engineering/ Manufacturing companies using Teamcenter Engineering / Enterprise and ProEngineer (CAD). Paul Angier and Elizabeth Ayer from the Product Development group focusing on CAD integration represented Siemens/UGS. Dan Handtke represented ITI which is the development partner for IPEM. Jon Jarrett was present at this event on behalf of his company ATK and also as the Technical Director of the PLM World Organization. A total of 30 personnel participated in this technical event.
The day started with informal breakfast, where everybody got a chance to get to know each other from the different companies. Fred Bellio, Director of Global Product Development Process and Systems welcomed the gathering and asked the technical personnel to focus on the possibility of incorporating the process validation and technical validation of the CAD integration software into the discussions with Siemens/ UGS. Neel Venkataraman, the leader of the Teamcenter ProEngineer Special Interest Group also welcomed the participants and coordinated the day’s event. Paul Angier started off with the road map plans for IPEM for this year and next year. He also demonstrated some significant functionality changes like Modelcheck integration, Teamcenter Revise, PSE (Configuration Support), etc. in the upcoming release of the IPEM 7.0 software scheduled to be released by fourth quarter of 2007. The morning session was very active with lively discussions, questions and concerns between the participants and Paul Angier on the future of the integration.
After lunch, Neel Venkataraman presented the key issues (PRs) and enhancements (ERs) put together with the help of different companies. These were the same issues and enhancement requests that were voted upon by different companies earlier this year prior to the UGS Connection Conference 2007 at Long Beach, CA. Neel’s presentation was focused on performance issues, functionality gaps and the importance of user companies working together to drive ProEngineer (CAD) integration efforts with Siemens/UGS. Neel also presented Mercury’s Teamcenter ProEngineer configuration and key concerns and recommendations to the group. He was followed by Greg Guerrero and Dan Mason of Caterpillar, Mary Ubach from Emerson Technologies and Andy Holl from Goodrich. They presented their key issues, current configurations setups, recommendations, etc.
There was active participation from personnel from Harley Davidson, Aerojet, Timken, BAE systems and ATK throughout the afternoon session. While the different issues, ideas and recommendations were being discussed in depth, all were noted down on a white board, which were later ranked by all the user companies to identify the top key issues.
The event was very successful in bringing together different companies using Teamcenter Engineering/ Enterprise with ProEngineer (CAD), bouncing off ideas, learning from each other, and discussing issues and ideas on how to fix them, assign rankings and also the feasibility of having them incorporated in the Siemens/UGS road map for CAD integration.
Most importantly, it was agreed that business case scenarios for every issue or recommendation that was voted as a ‘High’ will be submitted by the participating companies. This will be further analyzed in subsequent Special Interest Group sessions, which helps UGS to develop a solution based on consolidated Business Requirements, correctly the first time. This will reduce the cycle time involved in developing functionality/solution from its release to maturity. A follow up teleconference is being scheduled to discuss the rankings of the recommendations and the process for submitting the Use Cases.
