Benefits

    •Simple and fast to install, set up and deploy

    •Essential PDM capabilities available immediately

    •Minimal IT expertise to operate and support

    •Realize benefits quickly for a fast return-on-investment

    •Start with PDM and grow to PLM 

Features

    •Single source of product data

    •Multi-CAD data management

    •Support for popular mechanical (MCAD) and electronic (ECAD) tools

    •Intelligent part numbering

    •Data exchange

    •Document management

    •Simple process management

    •Preconfigured roles and functionality

    •CAD-neutral visualization

    •Collaborative design review tools

    •Codeless configuration

Summary

The Teamcenter® software Rapid Start configuration delivers the world’s most widely implemented product data management (PDM) solution, Teamcenter, preconfigured to leverage common best practices and the expertise of Siemens Digital Industries Software. The Rapid Start configuration gets you up and running with PDM quickly and cost-effectively. By choosing preconfigured capabilities, you can minimize the costs of consulting and maintenance, allowing you to immediately realize the benefits of PDM with confidence that you have a growth path to product lifecycle management (PLM) when you need it.

Teamcenter Rapid Start provides computer-aided design (CAD) data management capabilities for multi-CAD, mechanical CAD (MCAD) and electronic CAD (ECAD) that enable you to effectively and efficiently manage, control and share design data across your entire design and supply chain. Supporting the most popular MCAD and ECAD tools, this environment provides a single view of your product data.

The visualization capabilities of Teamcenter help you extend this into an even broader collaborative environment. Your cross-functional teams can quickly find, share and re-use product data to help streamline product development.

You can use Teamcenter Rapid Start to manage everyday tasks and processes with preconfigured best practice workflows for engineering change and product release. Confident that these processes are followed consistently, you can work efficiently and effectively in a collaborative environment to meet design and schedule targets.

Multi-CAD data management

Helping to accelerate product development by promoting design re-use, Teamcenter MCAD data management and multi-CAD support enable design teams to create, manage, and re-use native design data from multiple CAD systems, including NX™ software and Solid Edge® software from Siemens Digital Industries Software, as well as Autocad, CATIA, Creo, Inventor and SolidWorks, all in a single secure environment.

By using Teamcenter, your design teams don’t have to migrate parts from other CAD systems to work together. Using your company’s native CAD system, design teams can begin sharing their designs using ISO standard JT™ files, the industry’s most widely-used 3D visualization format. JT is a highly flexible, CAD-neutral format that enables designers to integrate design and visualization from multiple CAD systems into a virtual product model that can be viewed, interrogated and marked-up by other team members, including widely-dispersed participants across the lifecycle.

Teamcenter Rapid Start includes packaged, managed review and collaboration tools to enable data exchange for controlled design reviews without requiring any direct connection to Teamcenter. Leveraging the power of JT, you can digitally validate product configurations without the need to migrate parts to another system.

Teamcenter Rapid Start also includes “Intelligent Part Numbering” to enable your company to define a standardized way to generate part numbers. You can capture important properties (e.g. material type, manufacturing location, finish, end-use, compliance, etc.) that can be used to automatically generate IDs for each part. Your engineers and other users simply apply the “rules” and a consistent part number will be generated as required when a new design or part is being created. Preconfigured options can include facility code, product family code, sub class and source code. Multiple numbering schemes are supported as well as multiple ways to capture the information, including list pulldowns, combo boxes, radio buttons, logical values and free text fields.

ECAD data management

Teamcenter Rapid Start enables ECAD teams to increase productivity by integrating disconnected design flows,

TEAMCENTERmanaging all of your design, fabrication and assembly data and enabling you to share data across multiple domains. In addition, it supports ECAD integrations with design tools from Siemens’ Mentor, and also from Cadence, Intercept and Altium. It also provides an integration gateway to enable you to integrate tools that you develop internally or procure from other third parties.

To help reduce product cost and facilitate environmental compliance, Teamcenter Rapid Start enables you to leverage your ECAD part library and make it available for use across multiple ECAD tools. Just as importantly, you can use Teamcenter Rapid Start to manage your parts and modify their attributes – as well as control project access – on an enterprise basis. By managing data in Teamcenter Rapid Start, you can reduce part duplication, prevent the use of obsolete or unapproved parts, assign compliance data attributes and focus procurement from approved vendors.

Document management

Teamcenter Rapid Start delivers standard integrations with Microsoft Office and Adobe to extend the use of PDM to users outside of the engineering department. These integrations can be used for creating and updating technical publications, process sheets, customer requirements, manufacturing setups, test specifications, or any other documents you may want to manage. You can even interact with product information and workflow processes directly through the familiar Microsoft Office user interface.

Teamcenter Rapid Start comes with preconfigured reports to support everyday reporting requirements. Reports are based on accurate, up-to-date product data in your PDM system. Preconfigured reports can help you track and optimize your product costs, materials, weights and more.

Whatever type of data you are managing, Teamcenter enables you to easily find the information you need. You can search on business objects and their properties using either preconfigured or user-defined searches and you can save commonly-used searches so you can run them again later.

Simple process management

Teamcenter Rapid Start provides you with basic workflow capabilities to streamline product development by managing the part release processes. This helps you more easily:

•Review, comment and approve or reject parts and documents

•Capture audit date and timestamp information

•Manage cross-functional review teams (notifications, quorums, etc.)

Leveraging the experience Siemens has gleaned from thousands of software implementations, Teamcenter Rapid Start comes with a set of preconfigured workflows to help you release your products.

For those situations requiring specific process compliance, you can reconfigure and adapt the Teamcenter Rapid Start standard workflows, or create new ones quickly and easily, without any programming.

Your PDM workflows can also be accessed from within Microsoft Office products, including Microsoft Outlook email. You can synchronize Microsoft Office tasks and activities, and automate a variety of inter-departmental processes such as review and sign-off of specification documentation.

Companies or teams that want to use an integrated and simplified change management process can use the preconfigured capabilities of the engineering order that includes the basic components of a typical engineering change process: change request, change notice and the required workflow process to release or discontinue parts and documents affected by changes. The engineering order also provides quick access to all change-related information including forms to store attributes for the change request and a set of folders to store related documents and parts.

Teamcenter Rapid Start also delivers a configuration management model supporting revision rules, revision status filtering and basic revision effectivity using dates or unit numbers.

Preconfigured roles and responsibilities

Another area of special functionality in Teamcenter Rapid Start is a focus on the tasks you do every day, both as individuals and as a team. Teamcenter Rapid Start offers preconfigured groups and roles that you can use to simplify common tasks. The user interface is tailored to each individual type of user, only showing menu options and applications required for their job. This reduces the user learning curve and improves overall usability.

The standard set of roles supports typical tasks such as issuing an engineering order, reviewing designs, releasing and approving documents and more. These tasks can be streamlined by using shortcut links in the “I want to” area of the user interface. The tasks are automated by wizards, making them smooth, natural and consistently repeatable for a reliable and efficient process.

There is also an out-of-the-box role targeted at shop floor use cases such as “find parts” and “documents released for manufacturing only.” The role helps you view, measure, and print. Typical user roles for the shop floor viewer include inspection, assembly team, machine set-up, and more.

The security model and related information access is an important side of the preconfigured user organization in groups and roles. This means that different roles (approvers, checkers, designers, suppliers) can have different information access, depending on the lifecycle state. This helps ensure that your intellectual property is protected and auditable throughout the complete product lifecycle.

Platform and deployment

The foundation of Teamcenter Rapid Start is Teamcenter, which enables you to take advantage of best-in-class visualization capabilities and deliver visualization, collaboration and design review using JT and a large number of other 2D and 3D file formats. Organizations that work in a multi-CAD environment can perform analysis on 3D assemblies without requiring access to a CAD system.

Teamcenter Rapid Start comes with preconfigured Teamcenter translation services to automate:

    •2D translation including NX drafting to CGM, HPGL and TIFF; Solid Edge drafting to PDF, DXF or TIFF

    •3D translation, including Solid Edge, NX, NX I-deas™ software, CATIA V5, SolidWorks, Inventor, Pro/Engineer to JT; and Solid Edge to IGES, STEP, Parasolid or STL

    •Document translation, Microsoft Office to PDF

All Siemens translators can be deployed with Teamcenter Rapid Start, which is workflow-driven and creates the translation request based on available translators installed, types of files found as workflow targets, BOM attachments and user preferences.

Active Workspace

Teamcenter Rapid Start delivers preconfigured roles and workflows for PDM. However, if you want to extend your implementation to reach new users with browser-based access, you can add on Active Workspace. Active Workspace provides a simple web interface tailored to the specific needs of PDM users beyond design engineering. The Active Workspace view of PDM delivers exactly what the user needs, and nothing more, so they can use Teamcenter Rapid Start easily and efficiently.

Follow the path to PLM

With Teamcenter Rapid Start, you can start with what you need now and grow over time. Once you have Teamcenter Rapid Start up and running, you can add on Teamcenter capabilities as you need them. You can follow the proven Teamcenter path to PLM success, targeting key areas of your business to optimize performance.