Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment

Transcription

1 Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment White Paper Reducing risk and speeding time-to-value with a preconfigured IT infrastructure for PLM As product lifecycle management (PLM) becomes increasingly strategic, companies require more complex PLM solutions to meet their business demands. To address this challenge, companies need a more agile approach to PLM that enables them to support all of their complex business objectives while minimizing their financial and technology risk. This white paper describes a best-practice solution for a preconfigured IT infrastructure that enables you to increase business agility and accelerate the return on your PLM investment.

2 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 2 Contents Overview... 3! Business challenges... 4! Best-practice solution... 5! Introducing Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack... 6! Key capabilities... 7! Next steps... 9!

3 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 3 Overview Companies face ever-increasing competitive pressures from today s global economy to manage product development and reduce costs. With this in mind, manufacturers are turning to product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to launch new and innovative products, as well as to improve productivity, maximize reusability and shorten their build and change cycles. But as PLM has become more strategic, more people are using these solutions and placing additional demands on them to support their company s overall business objectives. As a result, PLM solutions can become complex and difficult to manage. By preconfiguring a world-class IT infrastructure and its services with an industry-leading PLM solution, companies can address this dilemma. This approach enables companies like yours to increase business agility and accelerate the return on your PLM investment (ROI) while meeting both the IT and cost- driven demands of your operations. More specifically, a best-practice solution of this nature will enable you to: Capitalize on PLM best practices Speed time-to-value and reduce risk Increase IT productivity Realize your PLM vision When looking for a best practice PLM solution of that can provide these benefits, you typically need a single source solution that: Provides robust out-of-the-box functionality Automatically expands to support growth Puts your database to work for you Ensures the performance you require Reduces IT infrastructure support efforts

4 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 4 Business challenges A wide variety of complexities are associated with finding and managing a single unified architecture for your PLM solution that can deliver all of the IT functions required to support your business. A variety of challenge arise, including the need to: Manage disparate systems Many companies manage their mechanical, electronic, and software design systems separately, resulting in missed opportunities to increase productivity and minimize system support costs. Failure to integrate your disparate systems increases your overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Provide IT support for your business processes Your IT organization will be ineffective in driving your overall business strategy unless it is able to provide the scalability, reliability and flexibility needed to support the complex processes that span your enterprise s various geographic, operational and technological boundaries. Maximize the effectiveness of your IT spend Your company must be able to optimize the people, processes, development tools, equipment and IT infrastructure that comprise your enterprise and its related value chain. According to Forrester s November 2008 Global State of Product Lifecycle Management Online Survey, today s top three IT issues are ease of integration, cost and scalability. The same survey indicated that today s top three business issues are scalability, depth of functionality and breadth of functionality. IT organizations face the daunting task of trying to resolve the issues raised by both lists in a balanced and cost effective manner. As a result, when they manage your PLM solution, they are required to take the following considerations into account: Complexity of your PLM environment, including: Global nature of your users Your software, hardware, and middleware requirements Your integration requirements Growth of your PLM environment s usage/ acceptance, including: Sheer volume of data stored and acted upon Expanded adoption of PLM across your enterprise Compliance with IT guidelines and procedures, including: Installation Maintenance Availability guidelines To effectively support a best-practice PLM solution, your IT group must consider ease of integration, scalability and efficiency in addition to the depth and breadth of your PLM functionality.

5 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 5 Best-practice solution A best-practice preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution is an effective way to reduce risk, speed time-to-value and address the following business and IT issues. Benefits of a best-practice preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution Business issue Capitalize on PLM best practices Speed time-to-value and reduce risks Increase IT productivity Realize your PLM vision Benefits In today s highly competitive global economy, decision makers look to industry leaders to help them beat the learning curve and understand how to capitalize on the benefits of PLM. Companies are looking for proven best practices to help ensure PLM success and support their business initiatives, such as: PLM solutions and business processes IT/technology infrastructure Enterprise transformation expertise Industry-specific business knowledge As PLM solutions become more complex and begin to be classified as enterprise level applications, it is critical that you leverage the expertise of your PLM vendor, as well as your own IT staff, and the capabilities of your IT infrastructure. You need to make the most out of the robust functionality that is offered, as well as the preconfigurations and support that are available. By using a preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution that is provided by a single vendor, you can speed the installation process and reduce the risks associated with installing, running and maintaining your solution. Preconfiguring an advanced IT infrastructure with a robust PLM solution delivers productivity gains in several areas. Administration is properly aligned, which facilitates better centralized control. You can leverage your existing IT staff by simply expanding its roles and responsibilities instead of having to teach new skills or add extra staff. You can let the system work for you by using the advanced features available within your IT infrastructure and PLM solution. The role of PLM continues to deepen and expand within many companies. A preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution helps realize your PLM vision and accelerate PLM ROI. You can improve interoperability between your PLM solution and your other enterprise applications and legacy systems by: Leveraging open, standards-based technology Utilizing existing predefined integrations Leveraging legacy applications for operational efficiency while supporting agile application transitions Integrating PLM with your existing business processes

6 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 6 Introducing Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack Siemens PLM Software and IBM have partnered to provide a best practice preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution that meets your company s growing needs. Siemens PLM Software s Teamcenter suite provides the world s most widely used PLM solutions. Teamcenter powers innovation and productivity by connecting people and processes with a single source of product and process knowledge. Teamcenter s comprehensive portfolio of proven digital lifecycle management solutions is built on an open foundation to power end-to-end PLM. Teamcenter solutions enable companies to meet today s critical business challenges and performance goals, including the need to increase the yield of innovation, compress time-to-market, meet business and regulatory requirements, optimize resources and facilitate global collaboration. More specifically, Teamcenter provides: A single source of product and process knowledge Instant collaboration End-to-end PLM empowerment Lower cost of ownership Proven global leadership With over 25 year experience in the PLM market and leveraging its own experience as a global manufacturer, IBM provides comprehensive global industry expertise, strategy, business processes, implementation consulting services, and application support services. IBM also performs IT infrastructure implementation, support and management services. Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack provides Teamcenter software preconfigured with IBM Information Management (DB2) and WebSphere Application Server. Optional IBM components include Tivoli Access Manager to support single sign-on, Tivoli Storage Manager to support cost effective enterprise storage management and Rational ClearCase to support the incorporation of the software development lifecycle as a component of the product development lifecycle. This paper primarily focuses on the benefits of DB2 as a component of Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack, including its ability to facilitate: Integration/performance While Teamcenter prides itself on being database-independent, Siemens PLM Software has worked hand in hand with IBM to ensure that all best practices have been met and that DB2, as well as WebSphere Application Server, are preconfigured into the Teamcenter foundation. Growth As you develop successful products, more and more employees will be able to experience the benefits of Teamcenter. As a result, your PLM solution may experience an increase in demand and the usage of its applications. Siemens PLM Software and IBM are prepared to help you grow and scale your PLM solution to meet your enterprise and departmental needs. Costs/efficiency Recent economic trends have altered the way that many companies do business. Many employees have been asked to do more with less. As the demands on your PLM solution grow, you may need to find a way to sustain this growth without increasing your operational costs. Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack provides advanced features that reduce the operational demands on your staff and resources. Open, standards-based technology Using guiding principles that are open and standards-based enables you to minimize duplicated work and maximize re-use. Teamcenter has earned several IBM certifications that support these guiding principles, including: IBM Ready for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) IBM Product Development Integration Framework (PDIF) IBM Ready for Rational These IBM certifications ensure that you can easily extend your Teamcenter solution to include other applications, enterprise solutions, best-practice processes, as well as further leverage your investments in legacy systems.

7 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 7 Key capabilities While the preceding sections are helpful in conceptualizing a best-practice preconfigured IT infrastructure for your PLM solution, the accompanying table describes detailed capabilities provided by Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack. Key capabilities provided by Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack Functionality Leverage out of the box functionality Grow as your business needs demand Capabilities Teamcenter comes with an integrated information management infrastructure from IBM that is built into its application suite. This infrastructure drastically reduces the amount of time required to get your PLM solution up and running by providing: Full versions of the IBM DB2 database and WebSphere Application Server that are preconfigured with Teamcenter Integrated configurations that are thoroughly tested to ensure proper data transfer and storage Additional Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack functionality provided through optional IBM software modules, including: Enterprise single sign-on capabilities that provide a single point for administering application security with Tivoli Access Manager Cost-effective online and offline storage management of enterprise applications with Tivoli Storage Manager Effective management of components of the software development lifecycle as part of the product development lifecycle with Rational ClearCase Teamcenter has always been able to scale to meet changing user needs. By integrating with the IBM information infrastructure, Teamcenter and its data architecture are now able to scale seamlessly, without implementing thirdparty middleware and databases that require their own integration and maintenance. With this in mind, Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack facilitates: Integrated IBM DB2 inherent scalability (DB2 manages some of the world s largest databases) Ability to grow seamlessly from the standard DB2 workgroup edition to the enterprise edition (both configured for Teamcenter) Deep compression (DB2 enterprise edition) dramatically reduces the cost of deep compression by providing industry leading data compression technologies that compress rows, indexes, temporary tables, LOBs, XML and back-up data with compression rates that can reach over 80 percent In addition, because compression allows DB2 to keep more data in memory (thereby avoiding performance-robbing disk I/O), database performance can increase considerably.

8 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 8 Functionality Make your database work for you Ensure the performance you need Reduce downtime and overall solution risk Capabilities The cost of database administration often exceeds the cost of the database software and hardware. As a result, it is critical that your database administrator's time be used effectively and efficiently. DB2 provides numerous autonomic features, including: Self-tuning memory manager to free DBAs from many common administration tasks As a result, DBAs can spend less time administering the system and more time focusing on other activities that benefit your business Automatic maintenance With automatic maintenance, DB2 automates the operation of the RUNSTATS, REORG and BACKUP utilities. You simply specify online and offline windows and DB2 will run these utilities during these periods (if it is determined they are required). All of this is managed by a userfriendly graphical wizard that will walk you through the process Health Center You can easily set up thresholds for warnings and alarms for your database and instance level parameters. DB2 Health Center recommends actions to resolve specific problems, which enables you to prevent these problems and ensure that your databases always remain available Automatic storage You no longer need to worry about certain storage-related tasks such as creating additional table spaces for capacity, adding containers or monitoring container growth According to an independent DB2 study, when using DB2 Autonomics, DB2 was found to take percent fewer people resources than other leading databases, significantly freeing up your IT department to focus on other projects 1. DB2 has dominated key performance benchmarks many times over the years, including both on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) benchmarks. By running DB2 in your Teamcenter-driven PLM solution, you can do more work on your existing hardware, thereby avoiding or delaying costly server upgrades. With respect to this issue, Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack provides the following advantages: DB2 cost effectively meets the performance demands required by PLM IBM s optional performance optimization feature provides you with the insight and ability to optimize workload execution. This feature reduces cost and lowers risk by enabling you to do more work with your existing hardware. It also increases DBA productivity and ensures that service level agreements (SLAs) can be met or exceeded For many businesses, database downtime equals both money and opportunity lost. DB2 minimizes the downtime associated with many planned activities, such as altering a table, as well as with many unplanned events, such power outages. Teamcenter on the IBM Blue Stack facilitates high DB2 availability, enabling you to keep your database running on a 24 x 7 basis through the use of replicated failover support and various data recovery modules. This feature includes high availability disaster recovery (HADR), online reorganization functionality and IBM Tivoli system automation for multiple platforms (SA MP).

9 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 9 Next steps Siemens PLM Software has extensive experience helping companies like yours deliver the right products. With more than 5 million users worldwide, Siemens PLM Software s Teamcenter suite provides a proven product lifecycle management solution preconfigured with IBM DB2 and WebSphere Application Server to enable you to align your product decisions with the needs of your customers. Contact us today we can help you deliver the products you need to meet your strategic business goals.

10 White Paper Increase business agility and accelerate PLM return on investment 10 References 1. Solitaire Interglobal Study, 2008

11 About Siemens PLM Software Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with 6.7 million licensed seats and more than 69,500 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with companies to deliver open solutions that help them turn more ideas into successful products. For more information on Siemens PLM Software products and services, visit Siemens PLM Software Headquarters Granite Park One 5800 Granite Parkway Suite 600 Plano, TX USA Fax Americas Granite Park One 5800 Granite Parkway Suite 600 Plano, TX USA Fax Europe 3 Knoll Road Camberley Surrey GU15 3SY United Kingdom 44 (0) Fax 44 (0) Asia-Pacific Suites , 68/F Central Plaza 18 Harbour Road WanChai Hong Kong Fax Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved. Siemens and the Siemens logo are registered trademarks of Siemens AG. D-Cubed, Femap, Geolus, GO PLM, I-deas, Insight, JT, NX, Parasolid, Solid Edge, Teamcenter, Tecnomatix and Velocity Series are trademarks or registered trademarks of Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries. All other logos, trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks used herein are the property of their respective holders. X /10 C