Bringing together the product and production lifecycles in Packaging
Siemens helps manufacturers bring together the product and production lifecycles for increased speed to market, and quality. One area where this is evident is in the packaging and artwork management process.
At the upcoming PackExpo trade show, Siemens will have its latest packaging line control technologies on display. Below, my colleague Kerri Doyle talks about the upfront Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process and how it is essential to have a single source of product knowlege for accuracy. Plus,
the integration of the Siemens PLM platform (called Teamcenter) to familiar Microsoft tools like Word and Excel is a big productivity boost.
Kerri writes:
Take full advantage of the Teamcenter Microsoft Office integration by sending key product data to a pre-defined Microsoft Word template. Information describing the product such as SKUs, features, vendors, prices, selling points, NuVal scores, case prices, etc. can all be exported to a Microsoft Word template in the desired format.
This capability can have an enormous impact on day to day company activities and program schedule timelines – think of how much easier it could be to create a Sales Pitch, Product Introductory Announcement or a New Product Sell Sheet. Members of the sales team can feel confident that the information they are using to create their sales pitch is current and accurate, members of the creative services team have an easy method to capture and create label information and concepts to share with 3rd party agencies. The possibilities are endless!
The information sent to Microsoft Word from Teamcenter can be edited live (where all of the attribute value changes are captured dynamically back into Teamcenter). This concept of “enter once change many” can save companies a lot of money because less effort and time is required to get the job done. The Microsoft templates can also be managed using Teamcenter document management to ensure that information in Teamcenter is always exported to the right template. Integrations to Excel and Powerpoint are also available to Teamcenter users. These integrations are very useful to the end users in that the authoring tool is familiar (most users are already using Microsoft authoring tools, therefore minimum training would be required to allow them to do their job) and the users can still leverage the power of PLM (pull in the right data).
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Stay tuned for more posts on the Packging process leading up to the PackExpo, Chicago, October 31-November 4.
