As highlighted in the SAP blog, a joint meta model is said to be the foundation of the new Teamcenter and SAP S/4HANA interface, mapping products, structuring part life cycle states, changing objects, and documenting versions. (Image credit: SAP.)

In July 2020, SAP and Siemens announced their strategic partnership with the goal of cooperating on a common interface between SAP S/4HANA and Teamcenter—toward an integrated digital thread. In other words, the goal of this collaboration is to help manufacturers bridge the barriers between engineering, manufacturing and service.

Last week, Arend Weil, vice president of PLM at SAP, shared an update from the strategic software development partnership, highlighting several use cases and elements, as well as untangling the technical architecture of the solution.

In this post, I review the capabilities of this integrated solution, its level of maturity, and what will be coming next. I also elaborate on the technical solution elements and my understanding of what it might mean for other COST integration solutions available in the industry.

Product lifecycle management-enterprise resource planning (PLM-ERP) integration is often perceived as the Achilles’ heel of enterprise digital platform implementation. In fact, successful integration typically requires a clear master data management strategy with a complex data exchange orchestration across PLM and ERP business processes.

PLM-ERP interfaces are often complex for numerous business and technical factors:

Data models on each side of the interface are not compatible (basic bill of materials (BOM)/item/material lifecycle state don’t align, part numbers and business rules are different, some information is managed solely on the PLM or the ERP side, etc.).
Limited API/web or micro-service transparency and configuration efficiency on each side might affect how data is extracted, transformed and loaded from one platform to the other.
BOM change propagation from PLM to ERP might require advanced data orchestration to flag and propagate new, updated or deleted objects.
Data conversion might be required to push data from native formats authored in PLM (e.g., CAD, office files, etc.) to neutral exchange formats for downstream consumption in ERP (e.g., PDF files, CAD exchange packages, etc.).
Bidirectional integrated change management is typically required across PLM-ERP and triggered from either side, with continuous integrated task tracking from change impact assessment throughout the implementation approval process.

SAP Teamcenter Interface: First Release Out

Late October 2021, SAP and Siemens released the first phase of their integration roadmap, also referred as “PLM system integration 2.0 for SAP S/4HANA.” This first release covers the foundational product data management (PDM) scope: creating and maintaining BOM and product structures, as well as exchanging documents and managing changes across Teamcenter and SAP.

In his blog, Arend Weil, vice president of Product Lifecycle Management at SAP, elaborated on the first integration features from the SAP roadmap, covering how product development teams:

Create and maintain material (product) masters in SAP for either SAP ERP or SAP PLM to integrate with Teamcenter: mapping of objects and attributes across the two platforms based on business logic.
Create document information records in SAP. As there are several document types and formats created and managed by product development teams, the interface must consider how data will be consumed downstream in SAP—beyond the metadata and attribute mapping but also file conversion, neutral files formats, etc.
Replicate files from Teamcenter to SAP: aligning to data exchange requirements when sharing reference files with the wider enterprise or the supplier chain.
Trigger change management from Teamcenter into SAP: cascading data applicability through the creation and maintenance of the change master with “valid from” date effectivity based on a Teamcenter engineering change notice.
Retrieve SAP data for consultation from Teamcenter: also referred as the “ability of Teamcenter to show entity data of the integrated system to access business-critical data in the context of a leading object”—in other words, querying and synchronizing attributes of the replicated items/material masters and document records.
Transfer Teamcenter BOM to SAP: ensuring continuous alignment of product structures from Teamcenter to SAP, covering the engineering BOM (EBOM) structure on the Teamcenter side and likely assuming mastery of the manufacturing BOM (MBOM) on the SAP side.
Transfer classification information assigned to a product in Teamcenter to SAP, enabling the engineering department and extended supply chain stakeholders to work on a shared set of information: referring to the maintenance of object characteristics and relationships.

Furthermore, Arend Weil highlighted that the new integration was built on the following key principles:

A common domain model, which reduces the interface mapping related effort and is a major contributor to decreased implementation and maintenance costs.
A jointly developed architecture that fully exploits the capabilities of Teamcenter and SAP ERP but at the same time is designed to minimize errors and simplifies integration management and support.
The removal of dependencies, enabling development and innovation to occur on both sides of the integration without the typical effort and complexity.
An architecture, designed with scalability in mind and which is ready for all possible deployment scenarios.

A subsequent release of the Teamcenter-SAP interface is expected in Q2 2022 with the following features (for more details, refer to the official SAP roadmap on the customer engagement platform):

Plant-specific and configurable material master
Advanced event-driven bidirectional change management
Enterprise portfolio and project management
Information retrieval from one platform to the other
EBOM-MBOM alignment and process routing integration
Integrated business analytics and dashboards
Advanced change management

Furthermore, a subsequent release is planned for Q4 2022 with bill of process and bidirectional MBOM integration—something that looks like an attractive plan.

What It Might Mean for the Competition

SAP is extremely open with its feature development roadmap, and that is a good thing. With all these things, the devil is in the details. The exact extent of this integration will come to light with a demo or a hands-on experience.

Things to watch might include the following points:

What is available out of the box and what needs to be configured?
What use cases are supported natively?
What orchestration mechanisms will there be to ensure control of the interface?
What technical architecture will be underpinning this interface and what data payload will it be expected to support?
Is document format conversion part of the native scope?
What will be the license implications on both the SAP and Teamcenter sides to activate such interface?
What effort will be required to implement and tailor such an integration solution?
How would the interface be implemented across cloud/software as a service (SaaS)-based SAP and Teamcenter?
What open APIs are made available for advanced customization of the interface?
Will such APIs be available for integration with other PLM platforms, or will they be dedicated to the Teamcenter and SAP integration (making it harder for competitive solutions to integrate with SAP and Siemens solutions)?
How will this first release be implemented and would it be wiser to wait for a subsequent release?
Will this be a solution for mid-market companies or is it targeted at large corporations?
Who will be the first adopters and how will they capitalize on this development?
How will such integration displace the existing market for SAP-PLM integration?

What are your thoughts?

Reference:

“SAP Blog: SAP and Teamcenter integration: The new generation is released,” November 1, 2021.