Siemens Home and Office Communication Devices (SHC): Improving design process speeds product development

Siemens Home and Office Communication Devices (SHC) is a leading company for home and office communication devices. The company sells its products in more than 50 countries.

Business challenge
Siemens Home and Office Communication Devices (SHC) has several engineering and manufacturing disciplines are located at one single site, which is unique in Germany. Mechanical design development, mold tooling development, manufacturing and assembling are all done in Bocholt, Germany.

The pressure from the market in the Electronics and Electric (E&E) and Consumer Goods industries is very high. For Siemens, the stress of competition requires the company to reduce development cycles and time-to-market of new goods. Added to this pressure, the variety of products increases year over year, adding to design and manufacturing complexity.

Within Siemens, it was recognized that internal processes and products had to become more transparent, and ongoing improvements in quality were required. Finally, the company needed to enhance supply chain integration and collaboration to meet its market challenges.

As a result of these external market and internal company pressures, Siemens recognized that improving its development and product life cycle management process was a key to the future success of Siemens SHC. Siemens had been working for approximately 10 years with a 3-D CAD system: Euclid 3. All possible improvements to the system had already been exploited, and it could not be upgraded further. Siemens therefore sought an outside partner to help it choose and implement a new product life cycle management (PLM) system.

Solution
Siemens SHC engaged IBM Global Business Services to implement CATIA V5 and SMARTEAM as the new PLM platform for continuous product development process improvement. The IBM team implemented 45 seats of CATIA V5 (voluminous configuration), 45 seats of SMARTEAM, and PLM Software and Services valued at about €1.85 million plus RLC. CATIA V5, which has a set of predefined product and process templates, helps to quickly complete even sophisticated design tasks with a high level of accuracy.

Today Siemens has a completely linked set of data, from the early design phase to numerical control (NC) manufacturing. When making a modification in the design department, the mold tool design development and the NC department can modify the old data by a simple CATIA update, to include the newest modifications.

Benefits
With CATIA V5 and SMARTEAM, Siemens Home and Office Communication Devices has improved design innovation, taken advantage of existing know-how and tightened design-to-manufacturing processes to streamline development and reduce costs. Additionally, the tool helped make the mold tool development and NC manufacturing competitive with low-cost suppliers from places like China.