What is SAP, Siemens Teamcenter Partnership? PLM integration, FAQs

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) suite of solutions have been used by large industrial companies through the design, build, maintain and retirement processes. PLM tools support integration with multiple CAD systems, single source of truth for design and handover to manufacturing. Digital Transformation and adoption of Industry 4.0 can be accelerated by weaving an end to end Digital Thread around PLM and other supply chain / enterprise solutions.

SAP and Siemens are key players in the PLM area. They announced initial partnership in 2020 and continue to build on that. In this article, we will review what the partnership means, the integration scenarios, what it takes to be successful and some common FAQs.

What is SAP & Siemens Teamcenter Partnership?

SAP and Siemens Digital Industries (SDI) have been competing in the Digital Products & Manufacturing space for many decades. Siemens has been leading the market with its Teamcenter and Opcenter solution closely competing with SAP’s solutions like Engineering Control Centre (ECTR) for Discrete industries, Enterprise Product Formulation (EPF) for Process industries in Engineering, and Manufacturing Execution (MES), Digital Manufacturing Cloud for Manufacturing.

In July 2020, Siemens and SAP announced a strategic partnership to accelerate Industrial Transformation for its joint customers. The highlights of this partnership are as follows:

• SAP will position Siemens Teamcenter as part of its Design to Operate (D2O) solution with its customers. Essentially, this makes SAP, a reseller of Siemens solutions 
• In turn, Siemens will position SAP’s Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) and Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) solutions. Essentially, this will in turn make Siemens, a reseller of the SAP solutions 

Subsequently, in July 2021, Siemens and SAP made a follow-up announcement providing more clarity on how this partnership will be realized. In essence, the key messages are as follows: 

• The foundation will be a Shared Domain Model that will be followed by integration with broader Supply Chain and Manufacturing processes
• Between Oct 2021 and Fall 2022, several priority integration scenarios will be released to the market 
• Beyond 2022, other advanced scenarios enabling advanced collaboration and analysis will be worked on 

What is the value of SAP, Siemens Teamcenter Partnership?

Technical integration between Siemens Teamcenter and SAP ECC, S/4HANA has existed in the form of Teamcenter Gateway for SAP (T4S) for years. However, this integration provides limited value as it merely allows mostly basic and unidirectional data exchange between both systems. 

In the context of Industry 4.0, several Digital Threads (a record of a product or systems lifetime) across various domains like Engineering, Manufacturing, Asset Operations, Logistics etc. can be envisaged. Individually, each of these Digital Threads will impact individual value drivers e.g. reducing design lead time, increasing quality, reducing wastage, improving visibility etc. 

Now, imagine an End to End Digital Thread (a la Digital Twin – a complete representation of a company’s products or systems)! How much value can it create for a customer?

This vision cannot be realized without a shared domain model that enables bidirectional process integration. At a technical level, it also means allowing bidirectional data exchange across various Siemens and SAP solutions running on-premise and on the Cloud.

This is the precise area that Siemens and SAP can address together for their customers. 

What are the Integration Scenarios for Siemens Teamcenter PLM and SAP?

There are several potential scenarios proposed by Siemens and SAP have that can be classified as follows:

• Foundation: Focus on the common domain model and data to enable bidirectional process integration. These are of immediate priority and will be delivered first.
• Core Functions: First priority bidirectional scenarios built on top of the foundation e.g. Creation of Material Master in SAP, Transfer of Bill of Materials to SAP. These are planned to be delivered together with the Foundation.
• Innovate: Future scenarios that will add further value e.g. Exchange of Supplier information based on Vendor information etc. It seems that these will also be prioritized based on the scenario e.g. Make to Order, Engineer to Order etc. These will be delivered later in the roadmap.

These integrations will be delivered under the umbrella of a Next Generation Integration (NGI) solution that will be positioned by both SAP and Siemens in the long term.

How can the SAP and Siemens Teamcenter Partnership be successful?

Both Siemens and SAP are market leaders in their own domains with a significant global sales force. Traditionally they also address different buying centers i.e. Siemens works more with the Engineering and Manufacturing stakeholders than SAP while the latter works more with the Finance & Technology leaders. 

The success of this joint Go-to-Market (GTM) depends on how the strategy is executed across the three important dimensions of Customer, Partner & Sales. Please see some thoughts below.

• Customers: 
  • Clear and consistent messaging from both Siemens and SAP is of paramount importance to their customers
  • If a customer does not understand the value of SAP’s new D2O strategy, they may simply view this as a new commercial arrangement and nothing more 

• Partners: 
  • Both Siemens & SAP have a strong ecosystem of partners that have been delivering projects in Engineering, broader SAP domains or both. 
  • The right partners need to be selected per industry and market. On-boarding, strategic alignment, and selective enablement of these partners is also key.
  • In the case of partners that are strong in offering services for both Siemens PLM and SAP, internal alignment within the partner organization would be very important. This alignment would include messaging, communication, compensation alignment, and deal collaboration  
  • Partners may also have varying capabilities of showcasing the end-to-end Digital Thread and articulating its value. Such showcases may need to be upgraded or complemented in order to create an impact with customers.
• Sales:
  • It is likely that both Siemens and SAP would want to sell to the same set of customers
  • Readiness of their respective sales teams to clearly understand the joint proposition is key
  • Early alignment and resolution of such conflicts will determine the degree of success of the GTM

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What do you think of the Siemens & SAP Partnership ? Share your thoughts in comments

References, image credits :  SAP Siemens Partnership presentation