Siemens Teamcenter and Microsoft Azure solve the tough challenges with a modern PLM

Combining the real and the digital world

To understand the physical world, it can help to abstract it, and view it through a digital lens. Siemens AG focuses on technological solutions that help its customers identify and solve the big challenges across multiple industries. From infrastructure, to transportation, to healthcare, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their markets, as well as the everyday lives of billions of people. In fact, Siemens Head of Product Management for Product Lifecycle Management software, Ales Alajbegovic says, “We are providing industrial software for design and manufacturing. There is pretty much no company in the world that doesn't use our software when it comes to these areas.” 

And according to Siemens’ Global Alliance Leader for Microsoft, John Butler, those software use cases are ever expanding. “That's everything from working with our customers to reduce drag on an automobile or an airplane to improving manufacturing efficiency or helping design the newest product. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is figure out how to expedite that manufacturing process and that development process to get products to market faster for our customers.”  

Full visibility, from start to finish

There’s increasing pressure on businesses to review every phase of the product lifecycle for cost savings, schedule reductions, and other risk factors. Too often, problems come up on the manufacturing floor that are never addressed, causing a cascade effect on productivity across the line. To address these industry issues, you need a remarkable solution from an organization with a tenure to match. 

Siemens brought its experience – spanning nearly two centuries – from innovating across multiple areas of operations including the energy sector, healthcare, digital industry, and mobility to create a leading product lifecycle management solution: Siemens Teamcenter. With Teamcenter, customers can have full visibility up and down the product lifecycle, from planning, to manufacturing, to purchasing. Previously, siloed data, insulated teams, and technological complexity were challenges to a cohesive PLM, but Siemens Teamcenter is a modern, adaptable PLM that connects people and processes that previously were isolated. 

In fact, this solution is so thoroughly adopted in the market that Alajbegovic says, “if you were to turn off the [Teamcenter] ‘button,’ probably most of the manufacturing in the world would either stop or significantly be reduced.” And at a time when the customer experience relies on quality of products and speed to delivery, every second counts. 

When it comes to problems on the line that aren’t typically reported, Butler says with Teamcenter’s Microsoft integration, manufacturing staff that see an issue can “speak directly into their phone where OpenAI will immediately parse that information out and get it into the appropriate field and submit it without them having to type anything on their phone. Then using some additional AI, we can share that with a manufacturing engineer who's halfway around the world and who speaks another language.”

Built for security and scale

Teamcenter on Azure combines Siemens’s own industry-leading technology with the scalability, security, and reliability of Azure Cloud Services. Customers need to be sure their proprietary IP is protected, making Azure a clear choice given its security posture and compliance certifications. 

The scale of Azure was another determining factor. With availability in 60 regions worldwide, more than any other cloud provider, Azure enables Siemens to scale Teamcenter around the world. And Alajbegovic says scaling a solution like Teamcenter is critical for manufacturing on a global scale. “All this data from PCs, components, parts, you can visualize them and then have a perception of how everything fits together. Then that allows you to communicate with other members of the team, members of the management, with your suppliers, with your partners. So, in a way, you store the data, you manage the data, but then you also use the tool to communicate information about the product in a way that people can understand and do something about it.” 

Siemens has also seen a tremendous acceleration in its go-to-market timeline, thanks to the partnership with Microsoft and the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. “From our perspective, going-to-market on the Commercial Marketplace is critical to us,” says Butler. And this partnership has already paid dividends; Butler adds, “We were very fortunate earlier this year to close the largest deal in the Commercial Marketplace. It took a lot of hard work. We had our great account teams working closely with the procurement engineers and leaders at [the customer] organization. And for us, it was just a great testament of the great things that we can do together.”

From digital transformation to physical transformation

Siemens Teamcenter is giving customers an edge over the competition, and enabling new, better products to roll out around the world. And with the help of Microsoft AI technology, it’s just getting started. 

“From our perspective as we started getting into the generative AI technology, it was very clear to us, that Microsoft was a leader in this space. Their work with OpenAI was critical and was so far ahead of everything else that was happening in the industry. For us, it was a very simple decision” says Butler adding, “we think the future that lies ahead with Microsoft, with AI generative technology, it’s so critical to transforming the work that we do with our customers that we believe we need a partner like this going forward.” 

And to Butler and the Siemens team keeping an eye on the future is key. “As we think about the [Microsoft] Teams-Teamcenter integration with OpenAI, one of the things we think about is that that's just the start of where we're going in this partnership. We have many projects lined up around AI that we think will provide a solid roadmap into the future that, for us, we think will significantly increase the quality of our customer experience as they try to continue to drive manufacturing efficiencies.” 

Siemens Teamcenter, deployed on Azure, solves the tough challenges with a modern PLM.  

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