Products

Teamcenter + Rhapsody 🔪 1/2 program schedule

By Mark Sampson

📢 Siemens-IBM partnership – we have received a number of questions:

Q: Why integrate Rhapsody with Teamcenter PLM?
A: So you can deliver your products in half the time it takes you today.

How?

You will spend 1/2 of your product development resources and schedule getting everything – software, electronics, mechanics – working together.

Why does this happen?

Conway’s Law: you develop products that match your organization structures – i.e. we develop in silos.

The first time you bring the various silo developed components together is on the right side of the V where you discover they don’t work together and then start working through integration issues and expensive redesigns; often more effort than the original design.

Product Lifecycle Management – PLM – focuses on managing the product development process, encompassing activities from conceptualization to manufacturing and disposal. It ensures efficient capture, movement, and orchestration between different stakeholders involved in the product lifecycle (i.e. managing silo produced content).

System Lifecycle Management – SysLM – the merging of product architecture with PLM elevates PLM to managing the system lifecycle across the silos. SysLM is concerned with managing and delivering the product definition throughout its lifecycle. It involves capturing the “what and how” aspects of the product delivering the cross-silo digital threads to everyone involved enabling continuous integration vs right-side of the V type integration as the Aerospace Vehicle Systems Institute [AVSI] puts it Integrate-THEN-Build.

Just as you would never start a building project without a set of blueprints that drives all the building-crafts toward a working integrated solution, you should never start a project without a product architecture that drives the various domains towards an integrated solution. 

This means the value of the System models aren’t just the description of the what the product will do – blueprints – it’s in the digital threads they describe…

Example: this requirement drives these functions, performed by these parts, tested with these test procedures, on these test sets, performing this task in the program schedule, requiring these assets, using these supplier provided parts, on this schedule… 

If those system models are somewhere else outside the product lifecycle, it is like a set of blueprints that no one reads; meaning the effort put into the models is lost since it’s not communicating the decisions to everyone involved as they move through product development. 

The result is expensive integration problem discoveries on the right-side of the V that you can no longer afford – thus the need to integrate Rhapsody SysML system models with PLM delivering digital threads through the SysLM – System Lifecycle Management – environment and why it’s different than many of the standalone system modeling tools solutions.

Why using isolated system modeling tools is a waste of time?

Isolated system modeling tools like Papyrus, Cameo, SparxEA, and others outside of PLM produce models that don’t have the opportunity to drive product development.

When they deliver digital threads through a SysLM solution, it’s worth the modeling effort because you can stay continuously integrated and thereby slash half the time you were going to spend on getting through the integration cycles.

To learn more about continuous integration, check out these resources:

Questions? Reach out to 👉🏻 Mark Sampson


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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/teamcenter/teamcenter-rhapsody-shorter-program-schedule/