PLM Connection: BSH – Global Engineering Collaboration & Supplier Integration

At recent the PLM Connection in Europe I attended an excellent presentation and demonstration by Andrea Nagler from BSH (Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH) about their global engineering collaboration and supplier integration project.

BSH is in 13 countries and have 42 factories with 38,600 employees.

As they grew globally, their business challenges were long delays and effort required for communication between distributed development teams. This included increased partners and suppliers – each using different CAD formats which added cycle time to communicate and collaborate as well as ad-hoc alignment between internal teams.

Their motivation was simple –

– improve quality with better and consistent communication,

– improve cycle time due to faster access to information, speedy decisions, early start of tolling, fewer meetings

– reduce costs due to reduced travel,sample parts, tool changes, and export/import procedures.

They have 900 Teamcenter high-end users, 1,500 low-end users, and 200 external partners.

She talked about how they plan to use the Teamcenter Community, Microsoft SharePoint-based, collaboration solution that is integrated with Teamcenter PLM for visual collaboration and supplier integration, using:

– Teamcenter Community as a web-based portal for internal teams and external partners and suppliers.

– Virtual project rooms for sharing and administration of projects

– Application sharing

– Visual conferencing based on JT.

Andrea then did a live demo of the collaboration project using Teamcenter Community and Teamcenter with her team in Berlin!!! That was quite amazing. Together they demoed a live visual conference collaborating on a spring design for a coffee maker. They showed power of visual collaboration, and visual issue management.