Northrop Grumman presents a collaborative community at PLM Connection 2011

Day 2 at PLM Connection in Las Vegas:

I’m here listening to a very interesting presentation by Jim Ayers from Northrop Grumman presentation. His presentation, “Teamcenter Community Collaboration – Office Integration – Good, Better, Best” covers the business value of community collaboration. James discusses the challenge to agree on security standards across the U.S. Armed Forces (Army, Navy, etc.). Teamcenter community collaboration was submitted for AMCI certification, and with some enhancements to Teamcenter 8.3, it was accepted and in fact impressed the Navy that Siemens PLM Software turned around the functionality so quickly.



James talks about the heavy use of community workflow capabilities, and its use as the ONLY acceptable repository for released forms in the community document library. He pointed out the advantage of Teamcenter vs. Outlook or physical delivery … between the e-mail space/storage issues, the safety of a document library with a time tag (vs. physical delivery that can be lost or delayed), and the most interesting point of all, the vulnerability of Outlook email to subpoena/lawsuits under Sarbanes-Oxley.

In summary, James said if you’re just doing document management, Sharepoint is enough, but if you’re doing product development/product engineering, you need the embedded visualization in Teamcenter … Northrop Grumman recouped the cost of the investment in Teamcenter within the first two months simply by saving the travel costs of design reviews. He has seen the product pay for itself many times over and the functionality for the users has saved them a lot of quality problems.

You can read my previous blog – an interview with James Ayers about social networking in product development.

http://blog.industrysoftware.automation.siemens.com/blog/2010/04/13/improve-productivity-of-product-development-processes-using-social-network/