October marks a milestone for SAP Product Lifecycle Management. SAP will be executing on our partnership with Siemens and will begin selling SAP Teamcenter as an extension to the existing broad SAP PLM offering for the Discrete Industries.
It’s been a long road and lots of collaboration and hard work since the announcement back in August, but our software standards team has given us the thumbs up to roll out our new complementary offerings based on Siemens’ solutions. This means that SAP customers in industries like Aerospace, Industrial Machinery, Automotive, Tech or Consumer Durables can now buy the most comprehensive PLM functionality available in the market, integrated with the broad portfolio historically available from SAP, and bundled with our market leading, award winning service and support services on one contract – the SAP contract!.
The PLM solution for today is Expanding
If you had not heard, SAP is expanding its already powerful on-premise and cloud-based Product Lifecycle Management portfolio by offering Siemens’ Teamcenter capabilities deeply integrated to our customers.
Teams from these two industry leaders have worked diligently on topics, such as project management, product configuration, and advanced visualization, to make sure the partnership is a net positive for our customers.
With SAP’s enterprise breadth and Siemens’ engineering experience, PLM will not be the same. Imagine digital threads in SAP PLM, that start with ideation and wind through design, costing, sales, manufacturing and service, now having the ability to go deep into engineering when needed. SAP Teamcenter provides this extra depth and expertise when needed to manage complex product designs. You can consider this as true SAP PLM extension which offers new opportunities for our SAP PLM customers.
The PLM solution for the future is Evolving
In addition, our development teams are kicking off the design of a next generation solution to tie all product data even closer together and into the processes that drive our customers’ bottom lines. For the longest time, SAP PLM has been wide open to the engineering tool world, and we remain so, with direct integration offerings to multiple computer aided design tools and to foreign PLM systems. SAP knows that the genesis of master data is within the design realm and we can only deliver a true digital thread if we can make the transition seamless from engineering to the enterprise, regardless of its source. The benefit for our customers is faster product time to value supported by a sustainable product development process.
The opportunity is Exciting
Is this embracing of engineering data a good thing for SAP? Absolutely yes, it always has been. Being an open system and offering multiple paths for product data to be reused across the enterprise has been key to making our customers successful.
While our partnership with Siemens does not encompass our respective solutions for Manufacturing Operations Management, customers of, SAP Manufacturing will benefit by working off of the same master data as those engineering customers utilizing SAP Teamcenter. Engineering bills of materials, materials, documents and visuals are readily available. Change flows through the system. For those SAP Manufacturing customers using Teamcenter as their engineering data management system, they may soon be able to share project tasks and variant rules to provide specific instructions at the production order level.
Simply put, all systems and solutions (PDM, ERP, eCommerce, CRM, MES, EAM, etc.) have the need for Product Lifecycle Management capabilities. And only SAP can deliver both best in class and best in suite, on-premise and cloud-based Product Lifecycle Management solutions.
To learn more, reach out to your SAP sales representative.
