Teamcenter Product Cost Management | What’s New?

The Teamcenter Product Cost Management version 2412 introduces enhanced capabilities to help customers measure, manage, and minimize product costs and carbon emissions throughout their value chain. By integrating cost and environmental considerations, version 2412 supports organizations in navigating the dual pressures of financial performance and ecological responsibility.

Maximize the value of your calculations with continuously updated commercial and technical data

Expand technological capability: Incorporate new machines and manufacturing technologies into cost calculations, supporting a broader range of production processes. The machine benchmark data provide a robust repository of critical information to support precise cost and performance evaluations. Key data points include acquisition value, installation costs, operating supply costs, maintenance shift costs, energy consumption, technology-specific data like clamping force, specific machine parameters, etc. This detailed dataset enables better decision-making by offering a complete view of machine capabilities and associated costs.

Make informed negotiation decisions: Leverage quarterly up-to-date material prices to navigate negotiations with insights that align with the latest market trends. 10,000 materials prices, from 3 regions (EMEA, AMERICA, APAC) and a world average price, 7 semi-finished product types, and 3 yearly ordering quantities. With the 2412 version, you can stay aligned with the latest financial data through yearly updates for all overhead rates, including material overhead rates, research and development costs, residual manufacturing costs, sales, and general administration costs. These updates ensure cost calculations remain accurate, competitive, and reflective of real-world conditions.

Easily calculate carbon footprint: Start early-stage product carbon footprint assessments with the biannual updates for CO2e data on materials and energy consumption. Material data covering 5 semi-finished product types and a comprehensive scope of 57 countries and regions for each material. Detailed updates for energy mix data include primary energy data for oil and natural gas across 57 countries. All data is compatible with industry standards such as ISO 14067, ISO 14040 ff., GHG Protocol, and PAS 2060. Calculation methodologies are validated by GUTcert (ISO 14064-3-2019-04), ensuring accuracy and reliability for sustainability reporting. All these updates support robust and compliant cost and carbon footprint calculations, meeting global standards and enabling informed decision-making.

Optimize manufacturing accuracy: Rely on accurate, pre-configured processes using the latest knowledge and machinery data to improve cost reliability and manufacturing outcomes.

• Knowledge domain extension for battery cell and battery module manufacturing: As the automotive sector shifts towards electrification, there is a significant increase in customer demand for reference processes and benchmark data specific to battery cell manufacturing and electronics production. This demand arises from the need for precise, reliable cost and carbon footprint calculations for battery components and electronic systems critical to electric vehicles. By providing standardized reference processes in these areas, manufacturers can better respond to market needs, optimize production, and support informed decision-making in the early design and planning stages. Therefore, we have extended the benchmark database with reference processes and machines for manufacturing battery cells and battery modules. We provide manufacturing steps for battery cell types such as prismatic, pouch, and cylindric cells, covering all process steps from slurry mixing to module creation. The machine database was extended with special manufacturing machines for battery cell manufacturing and module assembly. The new data significantly enhances the capability to perform detailed and accurate cost assessments in battery manufacturing, making it possible to evaluate and optimize each step in the process with the latest industry-specific data.

Modern, simple, and intuitive user experience for cost and carbon footprint calculations

The new release provides an increased user-friendly interface that is visually appealing and easy to use. 

The new table editor enhances daily usability

We introduced a powerful table editor designed to streamline daily workflows:

• User-friendly interface: The new table editor provides a familiar, intuitive interface, making it easier for users to work efficiently with data.
• Customizable views: Users can select and arrange visible fields, adjust column widths, and manage layout preferences with a user-specific, persistent setup.
• Enhanced functionality: With features like column sorting, filtering, and quick access to commands, the table editor simplifies data management, making it ideal for daily business tasks.

This table editor update significantly boosts productivity, offering a flexible, efficient tool for handling daily data operations.

Enhanced materials view improves usability and customization

With the 2412 release, the materials view in the material tab introduces a redesigned user interface based on table editor technology to improve usability and customization:

• Customizable Display: Users can now select or deselect visible fields through a column manager, rearrange column order, and adjust column widths. All layout changes are saved for each user, and there’s an easy reset option to revert to the default layout.
• Enhanced Navigation: In long material lists, the header row and commands remain visible while scrolling, allowing for easier management and reference within the materials list.
• Improved Command Alignment: The commands are located at the top of the list and are consistent with those in the table editor, providing a seamless experience for users working across both grids.
• Advanced Filtering and Sorting: Users can filter and sort rows temporarily, making it simpler to locate items, such as identifying the most expensive materials in a list.
• Extended Table Editor Integration: Fields from the new materials view are now also available in table editor configurations, providing more flexibility for data management.

New explorer header icons and traffic lights enhanced for color-blind accessibility

The 2412 release introduces new icons in the explorer header to align more closely with Teamcenter styling, creating a modernized and accessible interface:

• Enhanced differentiation for calculation accuracy and status: Icons now use distinct shapes to indicate calculation accuracy and status, making it easier to interpret at a glance. This shape-based differentiation improves clarity beyond the traditional color-based “traffic light” indicators.
• Accessibility for color-blind users: The shape variation alongside color cues makes it easier for color-blind users to distinguish icons, enhancing overall accessibility.
• Updated synchronization and refresh icons: The icons for synchronizing documents with the explorer and for updating the explorer view have been redesigned to align visually with Teamcenter, supporting a cohesive user experience across tools.

Further user interface enhancements

The new version provides increased visibility with a modernized design for part tabs and calculation headers. Further, we improved the detail view, external manufacturing, and controlling steps. This change simplifies navigation and enhances clarity by consolidating relevant information directly within the details view, ensuring a more focused user experience. These improvements ensure a more intuitive and inclusive interface, enhancing navigation and reducing potential misinterpretation

Establishing project profitability in the product development phase, from early concepts to product launch

With the new improvements cost estimators have the opportunity to calculate the project profitability over the entire lifecycle more effectively and identify successful projects.

Streamline project analysis with the new lifetime calculation template

The new version introduces an additional project template tailored for lifetime calculations, streamlining the process by eliminating the need for upfront configuration. This template offers enhanced usability and flexibility, enabling more precise and dynamic assessments of lifetime costs and impacts. This new feature is designed for users who need to assess lifetime impacts and costs without delving into profitability metrics, making it an ideal tool for long-term cost planning and analysis.

Enhancing lifetime simulations with price layering for materials

Organizations can now achieve greater precision in lifetime simulations with the introduction of material price layering in project assumptions. This feature builds upon standard material pricing by enabling detailed price layers to be incorporated directly from the master data. Here’s how it works:

• Price layer integration: Standard material prices can now include a detailed breakdown of price layers within the master data
• Simulation-ready assumptions: These price layers are seamlessly registered in project assumptions, allowing users to simulate potential price fluctuations over a product’s lifecycle
• Manual adaptability: Users can make manual adjustments to individual price layers for customized scenarios. If master data or manual input is unavailable, a uniform surcharge can be applied to price layers based on defined increase rates
• Granular insights: All adjustments are transparently reflected at the detailed price layer level, offering a comprehensive view of cost implications

This capability empowers organizations to simulate and manage material price dynamics over a product’s lifecycle, providing actionable insights for strategic decision-making.

Empowering sales engineers with enhanced quotation capabilities

Recent enhancements are designed to streamline workflows for sales engineers, enabling them to simplify quotation preparation. Intuitive features make creating accurate and compelling customer quotations more efficient. These improvements equip sales engineers to respond faster to customer needs, supporting both productivity and profitability.

Streamlining pricing processes with custom table editor configurations

Pricing users can now create table editor configurations, tailored to the specific fields they frequently edit to add margins in pricing calculations.

• Customized workflow: Users can configure the editor to focus on key fields, streamlining the margin-setting process
• Enhanced review capabilities: Costs and prices can be reviewed side by side within the table editor, providing immediate clarity.
• Improved efficiency: This feature reduces the time required to prepare initial offers for customers
• Optimized margins: Users can quickly verify that the highest possible margin has been applied to pricing calculations

This improvement accelerates offer preparation while ensuring accuracy and profitability in pricing strategies.

Enhanced efficiency and accuracy with comments in the pricing calculator

The pricing calculator module now includes a comment functionality designed to save time and improve the accuracy of price calculations:

• Streamlined review process: Users can mark reviewed cost changes directly within the pricing calculator, ensuring all changes are addressed efficiently
• Improved communication: Comments can document the rationale behind margin adjustments, adding transparency to pricing decisions
• Enhanced error prevention: Users can flag high-priority rows, filter them for focused attention, and reduce the risk of mistakes that could lead to profit loss

This new feature helps pricing teams work faster, maintain clarity, and safeguard profitability in their calculations.

Enhanced usability with tool-specific geometry parameters

The latest update introduces new icons for tool-specific geometry parameters, making it easier to navigate and understand key features like undercuts and slider areas, ribs and rib areas, and the ability to simply hover the mouse over any icon to see an enlarged view, providing clarity without leaving the interface. These enhancements simplify the user experience, allowing quicker recognition and selection of essential parameters.

Are you interested in learning more?

To get more details on the improvements mentioned in this blog post, look at Teamcenter Product Cost Management version 2412 (for registered customers only) and check out the other product cost management blogs.