Global Teamcenter Beta Testing Event – Product Development Success!

Integrating the voice of the customer into Teamcenter Product Development

This year, Siemens hosted the largest ever Global Teamcenter Beta Testing event. Participants came from across different industry segments (Aerospace, Automobile, Hi-Tech, Machinery, and Energy), at three different locations. The participants attended and experienced the new capabilities in our upcoming product releases and focused on our product development. Teamcenter beta testing started on May 6th and ended on May 17th. Many thanks to all our customer participants for their valuable time and inputs. Thank you so much for your words of encouragement – – it means a lot to us!

This event was focused on enabling real-world customer users to experience new solutions and capabilities with Active Workspace 4.2 and Teamcenter 12.2. Customer insights on functionality, usability, and reliability were the primary focus of this event.

This event also helped us collect critical customer feedback on the software through issue discovery and gaps in business use cases. We were also able to gather further product development and enhancement requests, helping us to understand customer views on the suitability of Active Workspace in their business.

Live product demonstration to visualize value faster

This year, we delivered product demonstrations of new capabilities to participants the week before the actual testing. Participants appreciated this, as it helped them prepare for the hands-on beta testing event, and allowed them additional time to think about the upcoming enhancements. During the hands-on beta testing, we provided business use case scenarios for the participants to test, which helped them visualize how these new capabilities could be applied in their business. Our customers were also provided with related technical materials to help them accelerate the adoption of these new capabilities.

As software developers, we tend to think about the entire product and the entire user flow, but sometimes it’s the smallest things that can help users. A minor capability update could make a key feature clearer. We know that gathering user suggestions on capabilities and UI improvements from our customers helps us to further improve the Teamcenter user experience. We also conducted explicit UX sessions, which helped us to collect on-demand user experience feedback on Active Workspace 4.2.

Beta Testing makes a difference in Product Development

During a two-week period, beta testers reported approximately 700+ different valuable observations. One-third of them were already known to us. One-third were made into enhancement requests and logged into our product roadmap. The remaining observations were logged as required software fixes, out of which a majority are minor software updates.

We also conducted a survey on various capabilities to help us understand our customer priorities, better.

With all our customer inputs during BETA testing, we are happy to say that Teamcenter 12.2 and Active Workspace 4.2 is fully functional and more powerful than ever before. With more capabilities to address customer use cases, tools for easier deployments and upgrades, and increased ease of use – it’s clear that Teamcenter is positioned to help our customers achieve a high return on their PLM investment.

Beta Testing Conclusion

The Global Teamcenter Beta Testing event helped us to collect and understand critical feedback from real users, in real environments, in person.

The testing also confirmed our confidence in functionality, reliability, and stability of Teamcenter 12.2 and Active Workspace 4.2.

Our customer participants were given the opportunity to know Teamcenter and its upcoming enhancements better with hands-on testing, which in turn can help them plan for product development and software updates well in advance. Last but not least, the customer interaction with other customers, and with our Teamcenter development leaders and product managers was invaluable. Insights were gained from each perspective, a win-win for all.