Siemens PLM Software recently rolled out Tecnomatix 9, a digital manufacturing suite that includes new features to enhance process planning, increase production efficiency, and enable robotics simulation and virtual commissioning.
Leveraging Teamcenter, the company’s PLM backbone, Tecnomatix 9 supports concepts such as the reuse of best practices and standardization, automating planning tasks, connecting planning and processing, as well as managing complexity through tools that enable change management, for example.
In production, Tecnomatix 9 manages workflow between engineering bill of materials (eBOM) and manufacturing bill of materials (mBOM), showing color-coded comparisons of where parts have changed to quickly verify the effects on the process. A time management module estimates execution of assembly operations, measuring all processes to calculate cost. And, the Dimensional Planning and Validation feature collects as-built information from the shop floor, managing it in Teamcenter, in order to run root cause analysis to define good processes for quality purposes.
Production is also enhanced through simulation and virtual commissioning. A robotic automatic path planning function significantly reduces offline programming of robots. In addition, the Tecnomatix virtual commissioning capability allows for testing real PLC controller programs against virtual manufacturing lines, which can lead to a dramatic reduction in commissioning time on the shop floor. Furthermore, standard libraries of intelligent components significantly reduce the time and effort spent on virtual commissioning projects by eliminating the time necessary to manually create logic definitions from scratch, the company said.