Technologies Of The Year -- UGS Corp.'s Teamcenter 2005

Success for manufacturers requires more than departmental optimization in developing, producing and marketing innovation, contends UGS Corp.

The ultimate goal is to close the gap between idea capture and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), says the Plano, Texas-based company.

Its enterprise enabler, Teamcenter 2005, is the latest evidence of the company's progress toward that goal. Serving as a PLM software platform, Teamcenter 2005 is designed to enable competitive speed across all aspects of a product's lifecycle, says Bill Boswell, senior marketing director for Teamcenter.

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View The 2005 Winners For example, UGS customer Callaway Golf emphasizes the value of PLM in meeting "a daunting demand for speed," reports Dave Oakley, vice president, rapid design and development. He prizes PLM's ability to improve design communication and collaboration with key suppliers regardless of their locations.

"By delivering fully integrated applications for upfront product planning and strategy, along with enhancing integration to Microsoft Office applications, Teamcenter 2005 effectively closes the gap between ideation and innovative product solutions," adds Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president of products.

With Teamcenter 2005, UGS offers an alternative to the conventional practice of using point solutions at each stage of a product's lifecycle. Clearly the UGS product strategy is to give users the opportunity to evolve from optimizing functions to achieving the collaboration necessary to gain optimal results.

UGS emphasizes that the Teamcenter 2005 PLM solution offers users more than tools for PDM, CAD, CAM and CAE. To enable collaboration, today's customers need links with sales, marketing R&D, engineering, manufacturing, design, finance, procurement and support, adds UGS. Boswell says the Teamcenter 2005 is designed to complement ERP and CRM tools.

Teamcenter 2005 is focused on three primary business initiatives -- new product development and introduction, global product development and regulatory compliance. The ability of UGS to offer that capability itself derives from collaborative efforts -- organic growth plus key mergers and acquisitions.

Anthony J. Affuso, UGS Corp. CEOUGS describes Teamcenter 2005 as the collective result of the collaboration with world-class people from acquired organizations with prior names such as Unigraphics Solutions, SDRC, EAI and Technomatix. Each one of those companies established functional leadership for their customers in each of their respective areas, Boswell says.

Bringing those companies together also posed technical challenges for UGS. It had to integrate a rich set of individual solutions into a cohesive and seamless PLM system -- without losing customers. In fact, the challenge was to not only retain existing customers but to grow the customer base while protecting each customer's investment in training, applications and data.

Teamcenter 2005 also marks the first time UGS has released all of its digital lifecycle management solutions simultaneously on a modular platform.