Products

Use cloud to calculate costs & carbon footprint

By Emilia Maier

Manufacturing companies are under pressure to accelerate product development cycles, reduce costs, and lower their carbon footprint. Moreover, the increasing complexity of modern manufacturing requires every company to work virtually with partners, suppliers, and employees scattered around the globe. Although this has several advantages, it also makes it more difficult to ensure that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information when and where needed.

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Why leaders move to SaaS (various sources)

Cloud-driven product cost management

With the Teamcenter® X Product Cost Management solution, part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware, and services, we offer a hybrid cloud solution for calculating product cost, carbon footprint, and profitability analysis. The client application is installed on customers’ local IT equipment or desktops. The application server and database are cloud-hosted by Siemens. The solution is built based on Teamcenter Product Cost Management and allows companies to quickly start working in a software as a service (SaaS) environment without any local deployment.

Teamcenter
Teamcenter X Product Cost Management is a hybrid cloud solution offered as a software-as-a-service

The importance of a reputable cloud provider

A major factor in the success of digital transformation is the dependability of the cloud provider. The expanded collaboration between Siemens Digital Industries Software and AWS has created a highly productive cloud-based environment offering state-of-the-art computing services, software, and support. SaaS offerings available from the Siemens Xcelerator open digital business platform, powered by AWS, enable companies of all sizes to achieve their digital transformation with increased flexibility, scalability, and accessibility—all critical factors to success.

With cloud-delivered SaaS solutions, companies receive rapid, strong technical support. One of the primary benefits of using cloud-based software for product cost management is the ability to rapidly deploy the solution. Unlike traditional on-premises solutions, cloud-based product cost management-enabling software can be deployed and in production in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks.

Siemens SaaS solutions on AWS offer flexible and scalable functional options coupled with continuous enhancements to future-proof a business. Instead of the IT staff being overburdened trying to keep the lights on with outdated, on-premises legacy infrastructure, they are freed to focus on activities that create more business value. Teams are better able to explore new boundaries and test their future aspirations—they are free to “create without limits.”

This type of freedom allows companies to quickly realize the benefits of product development software without the need for significant upfront investment or IT resources. Together, Siemens and AWS provide the broad range of technical support needed to deploy a pre-validated, edge-to-cloud solution quickly and reliably. The other significant benefit of moving to the cloud from an on-premises data center is scalability.

Organizations, enterprises, and especially SMBs, can scale up or down based on demand or business climate. AWS offers infinite technology resources available on demand as an operating expense. Capital planning and hardware acquisition timelines are no longer an issue. 

Siemens Digital Industries Software provides and manages all required infrastructure, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership for the customer and no requirements for the customer IT organization to host any servers or manage deployments.

Protecting on the cloud

The Teamcenter X Product Cost Management database runs in a secure environment in the cloud, which is designed to scale with the customer’s needs and users. We know that privacy, security, and protection are essential to our customers. With a Siemens deployment, your data is always available and backed up to the cloud. To support your data protection needs, we created the Siemens Trust Center as your one-stop resource for information about our policies, compliance, transparency, availability, and service.

Speed up and streamline your calculation process

With Teamcenter X Product Cost Management, customers can reduce time-consuming software implementation and updates and focus on calculating savings opportunities for costs and carbon emissions. This leads to a decisive competitive advantage such as faster preparation of quotation calculations. Cost engineers always have the latest data so they can start quickly calculating costs instead of doing upfront database updates for machines and worldwide cost factors such as energy rates, labor rates, etc. They don’t need to spend valuable time to find, collect, and import cost and carbon emission data. This provides them with the ability to instantly refresh cost and carbon emission calculations. Procurement teams can analyze entire portfolios of parts and validate supplier prices much faster.

Sustainability

A significant but less cited benefit of moving to a cloud-based product cost management is a reduced carbon footprint.  Multiple studies conducted by 451 Research found that moving on-premises workloads to AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80 percent and up to 96 percent once AWS is powered with 100 percent renewable energy.

AWS infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed U.S. enterprise data centers and up to 5 times more energy efficient than the average European enterprise data center.

The Siemens SaaS platform enables organization-wide collaboration and is a consistent source for all things cost and carbon footprint. Customers can get started with what they need today, and then add more capabilities and users when they are ready. Using Teamcenter X Product Cost Management on AWS enables companies to continually move toward a more digitalized work environment.

To learn more please visit the Teamcenter Product Cost Management webpage.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/teamcenter/cloud-costs-carbon-footprint/