Many leading manufacturers pursue a global product development and manufacturing strategy. Although this allows manufacturers to achieve tremendous economy of scale and scope, this strategy has increased planning and collaboration complexities by order of magnitudes, especially in the following areas.

• Planning global production
• Optimizing and effectively leveraging capacity
• Answering manufacturing feasibility questions with confidence
• Mitigating scrap, rework and delays

When product design and manufacturing are dispersed on a global scale, how do they ensure that their teams can collaborate, perform analysis in a secured environment? Often there is a vacuum between product /process design and the actual manufacturing execution. These two teams don’t have the suitable tools to share and exchange information.

At the design stage engineers have to deal with design data, CAE models, embedded software designs, etc. At the execution stage ERP and MES systems are responsible for managing job orders, inventory, scheduling etc.  Manufacturing process management solutions allows manufacturers to  manage their enterprise product and production data on a global scale. They can integrate the product design and production execution processes in a single platform. Teamcenter Manufacturing Solutions provides an en d-to-end solution to collaboratively design, validate, optimize, and document manufacturing processes .  Key capabilities include:

• Process design and planning

A single source of manufacturing knowledge can streamline collaborative processes and decision making across the product and manufacturing engineering departments. Teamcenter supports process design and planning by leveraging all of the product and process information for planning purposes, creating multiple plant views with process structure, scoping the process workflow and tracking BOM line items. This can reduce planning cycles and optimize production.

• Change visibility

Teamcenter provides visibility to change. Late-stage changes can have the largest impact on a manufacturer’s bottom line as the cost of change raises exponentially throughout the product lifecycle. Teamcenter communicates change from engineering to production in controlled workflows that include bill of materials management. Teamcenter provides production updates and validates the impact to existing production processes.

• Manufacturing work instructions

With Teamcenter, electronic work instructions are created and managed in one single source that spans the lifecycle, from Design to Manufacturing Planning to Process Instructions Planning to Execution. You can streamline workflow, and work instruction processes, including 3D visualization and simulation  to provide product context and demonstrate how to execute tasks

• Interoperability and open architecture

Underpinning the entire manufacturing process is Teamcenter’s open PLM platform. Teamcenter brings together all engineering and manufacturing information, including bi-directional BOM-BOP integration. By using ISO-standard JT files, manufacturing workers have visibility to 3D product designs in a CAD-neutral visualization format.

In summary, the benefits of using Teamcenter for manufacturing process management are:

• Concurrently develop product and process plans so you can make smarter decisions, earlier, and speed time to market.
• Mitigate the risk of late-stage change, which has the largest single impact to profitability
• Reuse proven global production capabilities to optimize quality and performance
• Leverage Teamcenter PLM investment to streamline manufacturing planning and operations, as well as engineering