Express route to out of the box PLM systems

Product lifecycle management (PLM) software is becoming much more accessible for manufacturing SMEs, with the advent of Express version of Teamcenter systems from UGS. “We’re trying to fast-track cPDM – collaborative product data management, with a bundled approach,” says Barry Dudley, UGS business unit director responsible for its Velocity initiative. First availability of the suite came at the end of December, aimed squarely at SMEs with minimal IT resources, probably on a Microsoft platform, yet with many of the same challenges as much bigger engineering companies. “So we’ve built Teamcenter Express on the Microsoft platform and dramatically cut the installation process – with a typical Windows install that just requires some information from the user, and certain information about the environment, and then builds automatically.” The objective: that done, SME users get a fit-for-purpose PLM system pre-configured with best practices in terms of workflows, reporting, queries and everyday tasks and processes. That is valuable. As Dudley says: “They will be struggling with initiating a design change, conducting a review, or re-using data. So we’ve captured formal processes. We’ll allow them to work better together. “One of critical factors is to put in place a single shareable data source so that when individuals carry out tasks – a designer releases a part or whatever – it’s all done relative to the same data, and it’s all joined up.” He claims the response from industry has already been “overwhelming”. Says Dudley: “We have already taken some orders based on previews of the software. The industry has talked about ‘out of the box PLM’ for years, but maybe this is the first example of it happening.”