Teamcenter Links Systems Engineers with the Product Lifecycle for Enterprise-Wide Requirements Engineering
On March 15, 2005, UGS released the new Teamcenter suite for systems engineers. Teamcenter now offers two key capabilities: robust requirements management and fully integrated requirements and systems engineering. This release sets the stage for the complete transition of the systems engineering capabilities formerly available in the Slate product line to Teamcenter, which will culminate with the Teamcenter 2005 release later this year.
Following is an overview of these two exciting capabilities. Ask your UGS sales representative for more information about Teamcenter for Systems Engineering.
Whole Product Definitions
Teamcenter's requirements and systems engineering solution provides an interdisciplinary environment that you can use to fully understand your products from many perspectives, improve crucial processes in your product development cycle, and drive your company's systems engineering initiatives. These capabilities include:
- A series of graphical building blocks allow your product design teams to quickly describe and build complex products on a systems basis.
- Capture and store these building blocks and their relationships for future use in your product data management environment.
- Methodology-independent groupware supports a team approach to product design. Widely dispersed members of your project teams are able to collaborate - even when your teams include external suppliers, contractors, subcontractors and customers.
- Automated document-generation allows you to capture, manage, and reuse documents that are a living by-product of your design process.
By facilitating whole-product understanding, requirements engineering enables you to optimize the tradeoffs associated with making various take-to-market decisions.
By implementing these systems engineering techniques on an enterprise basis, your company is able to understand whole product families from a holistic perspective that cohesively considers the product's customer requirements, program constraints and design elements. You can deliver the right product at the right time to the right market, and effectively assess the cost and scheduling impacts associated with proposed product changes. Teamcenter helps you optimize your products on an overall basis by simultaneously improving their performance, cost effectiveness, quality, and reliability.
Requirements Management Builds in the Voice of the Customer
By enabling you to understand and evaluate product requirements across every stage in your product lifecycle, Teamcenter's requirements management solution allows you to:
- Understand what your target markets and customers want in terms of documented expectations, preferences, standards and regulations that you capture from diverse sources as product requirements.
- Supplement these requirements with quantifiable constraints that determine the success of your take-to-market programs in terms of their cost and delivery schedules, as well as their ability to satisfy established performance, ergonomic, safety, usability, reliability, maintainability, recycling/disposal and other compliance related metrics.
- Connect these requirements and constraints to fine-grain design elements that you can trace across the configurations and product definitions that describe a product as it evolves across its various lifecycle states.
- Establish closed loop processes that feed information to product developers and program managers when new requirements arise, when your program constraints are in danger of being violated, or when review teams need to understand the requirements-related impact of proposed design changes.
Teamcenter enables you to capture and organize your product requirements in a shared environment that allows team members to collect, view and edit requirements from geographically dispersed and widely diverse sources using interfaces they already use. For example, Teamcenter provides live Microsoft Office integrations that support live viewing/editing through Microsoft Word, Excel and Visio-essentially elevating stand-alone Office applications to multi-user applications connected to an enterprise application. The Teamcenter environment ensures that the entitled users in your enterprise are working from the same set of requirements and product assumptions-while protecting the integrity of your requirements by "locking out" anyone who tries to access or modify a requirement that is already being accessed by somebody else.
Teamcenter's ability to digitally connect your requirements, program constraints and design elements is especially crucial when your enterprise is making time-critical design decisions. Because requirements are digitally connected to product structures, Teamcenter allows you to incorporate product requirements directly into the workflow-driven processes that drive your engineering, procurement, program execution management, change management, total quality and service/support initiatives.
