EDS extends product life-cycle management to Windows desktops

Computerworld - Product life-cycle management (PLM) tools -- long confined to use in engineering environments -- may slowly be headed out of their traditional niche.
This week, Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp. announced a version of its Teamcenter PLM software that is designed for use in a standard Windows desktop environment.
The product, dubbed Teamcenter Community, offers a range of collaborative capabilities that let users of Windows 2000 and higher access product life-cycle information locked up in engineering systems. With it, more people within an enterprise, including marketing and finance teams, as well as suppliers and partners, will be able to access, visualize and collaborate around product information such as computer-aided design models and drawings, according to the company.
"What this does is to move the world of the engineer closer to the world of the rest of the enterprise," said Michael Burkett, an analyst at Boston-based AMR Research Inc.
Such capabilities can significantly reduce the time it takes manufacturers to bring new products to market, said John Loo, senior manager of technical computing at Callaway Golf Co. in Carlsbad, Calif. Callaway has tested the product for the past two months and is preparing to deploy it across the company.
Teamcenter Community will let the sporting goods company's domestic and international suppliers share product data far more efficiently than current processes, such as fax, e-mail and postal mail, according to Loo.
With Teamcenter Community, suppliers are able to log into a common portal from a standard Windows desktop and access, view and comment on product-related documents.
The tool also offers some basic routing and version-control features that will allow Callaway to have better control over shared product documents, Loo said. "One of the biggest constraints when dealing with international suppliers especially is just the speed of communications. This is going to help us improve our time to market."
The move by EDS is similar to those of rivals such as IBM, Burkett said. But Teamcenter Community appears to be more tightly integrated with the Windows desktop environment than other PLM products.
"EDS has put the most effort in terms of extending it to the desktop," Burkett said.
Teamcenter Community is built around Microsoft Office's SharePoint services and will cost companies about $250 per user per year.

Read more about software in Computerworld's Software Knowledge Center.