What is our primary use case?
I do not work on something called a PLM in the traditional sense. I am more into the PLM space, specifically
Product Lifecycle Management, working with products from Siemens and Dassault. In Siemens, I work with something called Teamcenter. Dassault is another French company that also creates PLM products. Aras is another company from the US that creates PLM products. I specifically work on those only.
I also work on Siemens Opcenter Quality.
I function as a Tier 1 or Tier 2 supplier. I do subcontracting for Siemens, which has its own partners. From the partners, I become a subcontractor of Siemens.
What is most valuable?
Siemens Opcenter Quality is mostly used for execution systems, not especially on quality. Once in the PLM world, I define the product and what to manufacture. Then in the
ERP world, they tell me what to manufacture and when. Siemens Opcenter Quality is all about day-to-day or shift-to-shift operations, what is getting manufactured and how it has to be manufactured, who will manufacture and who has to test the quality. All those things are available on Siemens Opcenter Quality. A particular user will be assigned to it on the shop floor, and the operator takes their Siemens Opcenter Quality work order and goes through the operation list or the process plan which comes from Teamcenter. They execute everything. One of the steps can be a quality check. They will also be getting some sort of a quality input documents. They will measure, and if any measurements are there or any CMM machines are there, it will measure it and automatically fill the quality documents. Siemens Opcenter Quality is totally about shop floor execution software. It covers everything from operator to the machine to the raw material, to the work order, to the execution, and then updates back into
ERP regarding work in progress. Every shift, it has to update back into the ERP. This is how Siemens Opcenter Quality is effectively used for shop floor operations.
The first thing is that there are not many good softwares for shop floor execution, and Siemens Opcenter Quality is one of the good tools which works on the shop floor. It is an integrated software to capture end-to-end process. I can perform the operation, do quality check and if it fails, I can raise a non-conformance. It directly goes to Teamcenter as a change request. This integration between the systems and automation is the unique selling point of this software. If I buy something from outside, maybe they may not get integrated and all those problems I may get into it. However, here it is a tight integration because it is coming from the same product.
Siemens Opcenter Quality is connected with the edge software on the shop floor machines. Automatically, when it is coming up, all the statistics and real-time information of each and every product being manufactured or assembly being done is getting updated into Siemens Opcenter Quality. Siemens Opcenter Quality has something called Manufacturing Excellence. These are dashboards which will continuously give the OEE and all those information directly to the user. It will also capture complete plant information. This is a good thing for this aspect.
Another valuable feature is the traceability feature.
What needs improvement?
Siemens Opcenter Quality's look and feel is not great. It looks like too many fields and other things. It is not
Gen Z friendly because everything has to be typed. There is nothing around voice control or the ability to just speak to it. Those things are missing drastically. It looks like a web interface, but it looks more like Excel. I have to fill so many fields and readability-wise, it is not great on that front from a UX perspective. They are improving, but still not to the standards of current generation or current UI/UX design. It is a bit old.
There are a lot of features which are missing in Siemens Opcenter Quality. Something that comes to mind right away is the BOM, the Bill of Material and other things. Usually, from the sender, it is sent as a Bill of Material hierarchy. There, it is treated as a part list only. Even though they have hierarchy, it is not exactly the same hierarchy that I see in Teamcenter. These things they can improve better, and that will be helpful. The user interface should change. It is not user-friendly because it is used by somebody on the shop floor. It should be so intuitive that anybody can just look at it and be able to understand. But right now, the UI looks very busy. I can say it is a complex UI.
It is really expensive, too expensive.
There are no major products in the market which does this. I saw some things in Europe which are open source, but not great softwares. They are open source, so they are almost free with less price, but this runs into millions. I was looking for around 10,000 users and it almost cost me four or five million worth of software.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working on the same products for almost 25 years. Siemens Opcenter Quality is pretty new, but I have been working with Teamcenter for the last 20 years, minimum 20 years.
How are customer service and support?
Siemens is always good. They get paid, and it is always consistent. I have to take the membership and become a member of them, and they do very good support. GTAC support is there for them.
What other advice do I have?
There is a lot of value in the money with Siemens Opcenter Quality. Right now, when talking about any industry which is doing design and manufacturing, people have been using automation in designing from 1980s when the
CAD software came up. Then around 2000s, something called PLM came up with process planning, and ERP is already there. ERP is mandatory. However, for operations on the shop floor, there is no mandatory tool. Everybody uses Excel or the shop floor production manager, and the production supervisor's brain is important. This tool will decrease the dependence on Excel. In Excel, a human has to intervene and do all those things, and if something goes wrong, everything has to be rescheduled for that particular shift. At that time, time is lost and I need the supervisor and only with his brain can he tell what is the right way or the optimal way. However, this tool can optimally do the recalculation and based on the number of machines available, number of operators available, and number of the products and work orders they are about to complete. Based on that, this automatically calculates. This is really a game-changing software. There are some people who are building it, but I do not know how good they are in the market. As part of my job, I am also trying to build this type of software internally. Maybe in six months, I will be having a prototype type of solution from my end.
I will give an example from my Indian experience. I went to one of the manufacturing companies and usually the operators are supposed to review the work instructions and implement them. There was a guy with 20 years of experience who was not even looking at the work instructions and was machining the product. I asked him, "What is the problem with you? Why don't you check it?" He replied, "I have been doing this for the last 20 years, the same thing." However, he does not know whether in the last one year or last one month, there may have been a change in shape or a size or a material or something got changed. The process might have improved. He does not know. However, these systems will enforce them to view the work instructions and then only operate it. Without viewing, it will not allow the operation. These types of restrictions on the shop floor are needed, and most of the time shop floor people reinvent the process, which can lead to more scrap. They are not supposed to reinvent. They are supposed to only build what the process planner has designed or the manufacturing engineer has designed. If they are asked to design something and follow the process and these people are creating a new process, maybe experienced people can do a better job on the shop floor, but everybody is not experienced and everybody does not know the complete details that the engineer or the manufacturing engineer or the process planner knows. So these people should not invent anything on the shop floor. If I do not have this type of systems, maybe some companies are running, but they do not understand how much waste they are creating because of this recreation at the shop floor. Those things are what need to be the game changer for everyone.
It is medium complex. Anything involving enterprise products will be a bit complex. However, it is doable.
My overall review rating for this product is 7 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
