INDUSTRY

UGS today announced that, through its new release of Tecnomatix Version 7.6, the company is expanding the breadth and business benefit of PLM technology by delivering the PLM industry's most complete and open integration to a world- class digital manufacturing solution. To help its customers further accelerate time-to-market and facilitate product and process innovation, UGS has significantly enhanced the integration between Tecnomatix 7.6 -- the latest version announced today in a separate press release -- and its Teamcenter solution, the world's most widely used PLM software portfolio. In addition, by adding support for UGS' widely adopted open software components, Tecnomatix 7.6 also enables integration with non-UGS PLM offerings and facilitates easy adoption by the global manufacturing community regardless of the diversity of their information technology environments. "The emergence of Digital Manufacturing technology and solution sets represents one of the most significant value propositions for the manufacturing community in the last decade or more," said Dick Slansky, senior analyst PLM & Discrete Manufacturing, ARC Advisory Group. "In a competitive landscape where time-to-market, speed of product launches and reducing the cost of producing product have become the differentiating factors for profit or loss, maintaining market share, and effective global manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing is a technology that can deliver solutions to meet these needs. "With the release of its Tecnomatix 7.6 Digital Manufacturing solution set, UGS has integrated all elements of the production process with product design, and is providing the technologies of Digital Manufacturing as an integral component of their overall PLM system. Tecnomatix 7.6 leverages a natural extension of the Teamcenter PLM backbone, enabling tight collaboration across the design/build process where manufacturing and design engineers can create and plan production processes concurrent with product design. Moreover, with Tecnomatix 7.6 manufacturers can virtually create, plan, validate and execute production processes, for workcells, machines, production lines and entire plants before purchasing and commissioning a single piece of physical equipment." Teamcenter for manufacturing maximizes PLM value Extending the knowledge capture, management and distribution features of Teamcenter into process planning and the production environment provides a virtual 'manufacturing backbone' to support the world-class functionality of Tecnomatix. This manufacturing backbone establishes a tightly linked association between product design data and the elements of manufacturing process, plant and resource information, thus bringing historically autonomous disciplines together in a common workflow that enables the sharing of important product updates, changes and revisions. The result is a more complete PLM solution that shares data models between product and process design and manufacturing execution with feedback loops that facilitate continuous process improvement and support global innovation networks. The manufacturing backbone provided by Teamcenter breaks down virtual walls between product design and manufacturing, dramatically enhancing a company's ability to bring products to market faster. By leveraging the scalability, performance and open attributes of Teamcenter, manufacturing customers can maximize the value of their PLM systems and better cope with the challenges of globalization through a system that provides worldwide visibility and control throughout the lifecycle. "Digital Manufacturing is part of a major PLM initiative at Rolls-Royce," said Matt Thomas, Systems Implementation Manager, Rolls-Royce Corporation. "The UGS Teamcenter manufacturing backbone is a critical part of our overall approach to PLM in bringing digital product design and digital manufacturing together as one, and facilitating open integration to our ERP and MES systems." Tecnomatix enhancements deliver on multi-year roadmap With the release of Tecnomatix 7.6, Teamcenter users are now able to manage and share manufacturing bills-of-processes that were authored using Tecnomatix tools. Changes made in the process plan are automatically reflected within Teamcenter. The bill-of-process is under constant PLM control with changes in the product structure, revisions, and change notification being in constant association with the manufacturing process. This provides users of Tecnomatix with a significant advantage in their ability to collaborate during the product design phase, eliminating errors that add cost and time to the overall product introduction process. The result is a significant improvement to the overall quality of newly introduced products required by today's leading manufacturers. The enhanced integration between Tecnomatix and Teamcenter further delivers upon a multi-year roadmap, initiated over three years ago. Several points of enhanced integration between Tecnomatix 7.6 and Teamcenter create value through a wide variety of business benefits: * Enhanced integration of product and process variations enables configurable process planning, management and collaboration. * A new resource browser links into Teamcenter's Resource Manager to ensure data consistency and improve process quality. * Support for process modules and process elements within the integration improves coverage of final assembly workflows. Open solutions provide customers with maximum deployment flexibility Consistent with UGS' PLM Open business model, Tecnomatix 7.6 has adopted the open technology offered through UGS' PLM Components family of solutions. The new release of Tecnomatix now includes native JT and PLM XML support to enable integration with a wide variety of UGS and non-UGS PLM platforms. Specifically, Tecnomatix 7.6 enables the modeling of kinematics and part geometry in the widely adopted 3D JT data format to provide instant compatibility with the rapidly growing universe of software applications that have adopted this visualization and collaboration standard. In addition, Tecnomatix utilizes PLM XML -- UGS' XML standard language -- to enable its integration with Teamcenter as well as other third party applications. This open approach enables UGS customers to take advantage of Tecnomatix's best-in- class digital manufacturing functionality regardless of their existing information technology environment. "Innovation leaders continue to embrace digital manufacturing as a competitive advantage in their ongoing quest to bring products to market faster. It is clear that digital manufacturing tools are providing the technology foundation for a cohesive, high-performance methodology for design, build and execution of the entire manufacturing process," said Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president of Products, UGS. "Tecnomatix enables manufacturers to deploy complete methods and processes on new and existing products. And of course, the scalable nature of the tools accommodates the mass variation common in today's organizations. Together with Teamcenter, UGS' market leading PLM suite, the Tecnomatix digital manufacturing solution can be connected to all of an organization's relevant business systems because of UGS' PLM Open business model. In this way, UGS is bridging the gap between product design and production process definition."