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A Brief Guide to Integrating Teamcenter with other Enterprise

Systems
Article by Graham McCall C.Eng M.I.Mech.E
To learn more about
AESSiS, visit our website at

www.aessis.com

Click Here to Connect with Graham via Linked In

This article provides a high level

introduction to the topic of integrating
Teamcenter with other enterprise
systems most commonly ERP and
provides a review of the main technical
options and approaches that may be
pursued to achieve a robust
integration.

Why Do Organisations Have Separate PLM and ERP system?

It is worth reflecting for a moment on why companies are often faced with the challenge of integrating standalone
PLM solutions with ERP systems when many ERP vendors increasingly offer integrated PLM type capabilities.
There are likely to be two main reasons. The first is simply that many companies have older ERP and MRP systems
that make no claims to deliver a PLM capability. As a result they may have invested in a standalone PLM system
(like Teamcenter) because their ERP vendor does not have a PLM offering.
The second reason is that PLM and ERP solutions have evolved to accomplish different tasks. So although some
ERP software vendors do offer integrated PLM capabilities as part of their suite of business solutions, PLM solutions
from dedicated PLM software vendors typically deliver more complete solutions for personnel engaged in the
product development process.
Some organisations therefore find it difficult to trade advanced PLM functionality for the alternative benefits of a
single enterprise system.

Why Bother Integrating ERP & PLM?

Connecting PLM and ERP platforms to enable the bi-directional flow of product data is crucial for establishing a socalled single source of the truth and enabling the efficient transfer of information through the organisation.
Its no longer acceptable either from a productivity or an accuracy point of view to have bill of materials information
transferred manually between PLM and ERP. Indeed we would argue that the full benefits and efficiency gains
offered by a PLM solution like Teamcenter can only be realised if it is integrated effectively with up-stream and down
-stream information flows.
But when it comes to achieving this integration, what are the technical options and which one is right for your
company?
Its probably worth starting this discussion by referring to the off the shelf ERP connector products offered by PLM
solution vendors for their PLM solutions (Teamcenter being no exception). These typically deliver varying levels of
integration with some of the more common ERP systems or the export and import of formatted XML data.

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These products can be useful.

However, the
individualised nature of the integration challenge and
the sheer variety of products available in the ERP
marketplace means that these generic approaches
may not always provide the level of integration that is
demanded.
In these circumstances a more bespoke approach
becomes more or less unavoidable.

Get the Foundations Right

Before writing any code, the first thing you need to do is
establish firm project foundations.
This means pulling the right team of people together
from the start and agreeing the approach you are going
to pursue for the project.
At AESSiS, were firm believers in Test Driven
Development. This is an Agile software development
technique. In essence, it allows requirements and
solutions to evolve iteratively across short design and
development cycles.
It relies on high levels of
teamwork and collaboration. Therefore trust and
openness are of paramount importance.
The starting point of this test driven process is a user
acceptance specification. This specification will of
course evolve but it should always describe the latest
and best understanding of the integration challenge in
terms of how the information originating in PLM should
be reflected in ERP (and vice-versa). This acts as an
important reference point during subsequent user
acceptance testing and so needs to be kept up to date.
It is also really important to create a corresponding set
of test data (product structure, part and metadata
information) that is representative of your production
information. Not only does this help you understand
and describe your initial requirements, it also gives you
a consistent set of data to validate the integration at
each stage of its development.

Technical Options
Having defined the integration challenge, the next step
is to review the technical integration options.
In terms of getting data out of Teamcenter, this can be
done in a couple of ways. You can trigger Teamcenter
to stream data via SOAP (SOAP or Simple Object Access
Protocol is just a way for one program to communicate
with another directly via HTTP and XML).
Alternatively, you can export data to a file in XML or CSV
format ready to be picked up and read into the target
system.
One of the quickest ways to write out a formatted XML

Copyright 2010 AESSiS, All Rights Reserved

or CSV file is to use PLMXML.

What is PLMXML?
PLM XML was created by Siemens PLM to facilitate
product lifecycle interoperability using XML. It is an
open and published format that brings together product structure, part and metadata information together in a lightweight, manner in order to enable
broad and flexible interoperability across key PLM
applications.
You can find out more about PLM XML at
www.plmxml.org

The Simplest Way to Write PLMXML

The simplest way to get PLMXML out of Teamcenter is
to use the standard Teamcenter ITK utilities (more
about ITK later).
These can be used directly, right out of the box, to
export PLMXML data and at the same time apply a style
sheet to map it into another XML format or flat CSV file
(if your MRP solution does not support XML).
The next simplest approach, if these standard utilities
dont quite deliver enough functionality, is to write a
more bespoke ITK module that also exports PLMXML
data but with addition capabilities.
When PLMXML Is Not The Right Approach
There can be situations when PLMXML may not be the
right approach such as if you need to optimise
performance in the context of complex or very large
product structures.
In this case, exporting a
correspondingly large and complex PLMXML file may be
neither the most robust nor efficient approach.
Instead a more targeted approach might be desirable in
order to extract only the data that is needed and write it
directly to formatted XML (readable by the target
system) or bespoke flat file.
To do this involves building a customised solution
around one or more of the Teamcenter APIs and
toolkits.
Using the Teamcenter APIs & Toolkits
Teamcenter can be customised on both the client and
server side to deliver integration solutions.
There is no one size fits all approach and the right
approach will take into account several factors
including any infrastructure and financial constraints
prevalent within the business.
Nevertheless, a good starting point for this discussion
is the Teamcenter Integration Toolkit (or ITK for short).

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Building Beer Engineering & Product Development Processes

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Weve already touched on ITK when we talked about

the standard ITK utilities that are available for working
with PLMXML.
As the name implies, ITK (or more accurately C ITK) is
a set of software tools (C and C++ libraries and
headers).
ITK is a well established (its been around for many
years) way of building server side customisations to
Teamcenter (although its also worth mentioning that
with Teamcenter Unified, you also now have the new
C++ API which is an alternative to ITK and may be used
instead of or alongside IT in the future).
In any event, server side modules (were going to call
them user services from now on) are usually created in
order to accomplish resource hungry tasks on the
server (such as bulk release or export of hundreds or
thousands of items) quickly and efficiently.
These server side user services then usually need to be

accessible from a Teamcenter client. A very common

way to achieve this is to write another module in Java
that connects to the user service. This Java module
can then be weaved into the Teamcenter Rich Client
interface which is also written in Java.
There are a number of variations in this theme. For
example, you can expose server-side (ITK)
functionalities through the thin or web client. This is
useful when the Teamcenter rich client setup is not
required but you want to make services available to
those users accessing Teamcenter via a browser.
You can also bypass ITK completely and write
integration programs in Java directly into the
Teamcenter Rich Client Platform using the Teamcenter
Portal API. This can be very useful when you need to
enable more functionality within a Teamcenter client
and do not have the option or resources to customise
the server tier.
Using the Teamcenter Service Oriented Architecture
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AESSiS Teamcenter Integration Services - Fact Sheet

Solution
With over 20 years of Teamcenter experience, AESSiS help
organisations to integrate Teamcenter with their other
mission critical enterprise systems via our team of
Teamcenter & Enterprise PLM integration experts.
Whether you need help integrating your Teamcenter
environment with your sales order process, with Microsoft
SharePoint or with your existing MRP or ERP system it is
likely that we will be able to provide you with a reasonably
priced path towards a solution to your particular challenge.

AESSiS bring together leading Teamcenter

integration specialists to enable companies to use
Teamcenter more effectively in the context of their
end to end product development processes.
Business Needs

AESSiS Teamcenter Integration Skills at a Glance

Teamcenter Rich Client Platform Customisation via
RCP API, OSGI (Eclipse) platforms.
Teamcenter web customisation

A key strategic goal of any PLM initiative is to establish a

single source of the truth. In practise, this often means Server side ITK module development.
integrating and connecting disparate systems to enable
the efficient flow of information through the organisation. .NET/JAVA/C++ SOAs for web service integration
Those companies using Teamcenter are no exception.
Indeed the full benefits and efficiency gains offered by
Teamcenter can only be realised when Teamcenter is
integrated effectively with other enterprise systems.

Complex workflow configuration

Integration via PLMXML and Collaboration Context

Learn more about AESSiS Teamcenter Integration Services at www.aessis.com

Copyright 2010 AESSiS, All Rights Reserved

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Building Beer Engineering & Product Development Processes

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(SOA) Client Toolkit

Another integration approach that is becoming
increasingly important is via the Teamcenter SOA client
toolkit.
What is SOA?
SOA means different things to different people, and
it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore these
differences in great detail. But in simple terms SOA
is all about packaging up core business functions or
components (usually ones that dont tend to
change very often) into independent web services
based on standard protocols which accomplish very
specific tasks.
These modularised services, which should be easy
to maintain, can then be accessed by different applications allowing organisations to connect enterprise systems together as well as run business processes and transfer information across them in a
more or less standardised way.

If you have any questions raised by this article, please

dont hesitate to contact AESSiS or the author.

About AESSiS
AESSiS deliver strategic business improvement
projects & initiatives to improve operational & financial
performance in engineering and product development.
AESSiS combine experience of engineering & product
development best practises with expert knowledge
product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies to
deliver improved performance in the following business
areas.

Pursuing an SOA type of approach to integrate to

Teamcenter is very useful when you have other
enterprise applications that cannot be run directly in
the context of a Teamcenter client or server
environment but which still need to access Teamcenter
functionality or data.
You can even wrap up older ITK modules as an SOA
type service and reuse them in the context of an SOA
type approach without having to re-write them.
In a similar vein to combining a server side ITK service
with client side Java module, you can also use the SOA
toolkit to create user services, on the server side.
This is useful when you need accomplish resource
hungry tasks such as uploading a large product
structure to Teamcenter.

Conclusions
Theres a number of different ways for integrating to
Teamcenter ranging in complexity from the very simple
file based approaches to more sophisticated SOA type
approaches.
Each approach has its pros and cons and its own
price point.
In choosing the right approach it is important to take
into account the complexity of the integration challenge
and any infrastructure and financial constraints that
exist within the business in order to avoid creating a
solution that is neither over-engineered nor lacking in
key capabilities.

Copyright 2010 AESSiS, All Rights Reserved

New Product Introduction (NPI) Process

Improvement
Target Cost Management Process Improvement
Electronic Engineering Change & Release
Control
Part Count & Material Spend Reduction
Supplier & Partner Data Exchange &
Collaboration
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Planning &
Introduction

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AESSiS also have two technical PLM practises that
conduct that conduct full PLM implementations and
related projects & services.
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AESSiS are always seeking challenging & interesting
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business performance.

About the Author

Graham McCall is Chartered
Mechanical Engineer, Product
Lifecycle Management expert
& Executive Advisor on the role
of advanced enterprise
software technologies in
engineering & product
development.
He works with organisations to deliver strategic
business improvement projects & initiatives that
increase operational & financial performance in
engineering and product development via the
development of better business processes powered
by better technologies.
Click Here to Connect with Graham via Linked In