NEW YORK, June 20 /PRNewswire/ -- UGS Corp., a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced a new release of its comprehensive Teamcenter(R) 2005 PLM software portfolio with a wide range of functional enhancements, including a distinctive new solution to effectively address embedded software management for the manufacturing industry's rapidly growing use of mechatronics. The latest release also includes enhancements for product visualization, ECAD management, Systems Engineering and much more.
   
UGS made the announcement today in conjunction with its annual industry analyst conference in New York. (See separate UGS announcements from today.)
   
Bottom line value through mechatronics management Mechatronic systems consist of integrated electro-mechanical components controlled by embedded software. They are used by a wide variety of industries including automotive, aerospace, electronics, medical instruments, communications, office equipment and consumer products.

Mechatronic systems are being built into a growing diversity of products ranging from orbital satellites and aircraft to automatic coffee makers and personal wireless communication devices. The increasing requirement for sophisticated control systems in these products is creating an explosion in the number of electrical control units (ECU) and software that manufacturers must effectively manage and keep in sync in order to remain competitive and meet regulatory requirements.
   
"As time to market windows have become smaller and smaller,manufacturers have realized they can no longer wait to integrate the mechanical, electrical and software aspects of their products at the back end," said Chad Jackson, research director, Product Innovation and Engineering, AberdeenGroup. "This places a heavy reliance on integrated data management, configuration management and cross-disciplinary synchronization."
   
With today's announcement of the latest release of Teamcenter, the world's most widely used PLM portfolio, UGS is delivering a data management solution that can manage software as individual components of a product, just as it does with any of the mechanical or electrical components. By including embedded software in revision control, engineering workflows, change management and configuration management, Teamcenter helps companies improve their product development processes by ensuring correct software builds for different product development milestones.
  
"Teamcenter's new embedded software management capability provides a synchronized view of software and electro-mechanical parts based on the same packaging criteria which helps companies significantly reduce design iterations due to versioning errors," said Steve Bashada, vice president of Teamcenter Applications, UGS. "With a new solution to better control their mechatronics management process, companies could lower their expenses associated with regulatory compliance and reduce the need for costly and complex after-sale product software service updates. The improved product quality and cost reductions could be translated into higher revenues and increased profit."

Key integrations strengthen mechatronics solution
Consistent with its open business strategy, UGS has integrated Teamcenter with a number of key third party solutions for the industry's most complete mechatronics management offering. By coupling Teamcenter's embedded software management capabilities with its integration to IBM(R) Rational(R) ClearCase(R), which provides management and control of software development assets, UGS is providing complete product lifecycle management for embedded software.
   
In addition Teamcenter includes new integrations with Cadence(R) Allegro(R) and Mentor Graphics Board Station(R), two of the industry's leading printed circuit board design solutions. These integrations allow users to populate electrical component bills-of-material directly in Teamcenter, check-in/out native design files and create and manage derived files. ECAD/MCAD interchange files are supported along with the archival of fabrication data in a single location that also includes access to assembly data. With Teamcenter, published open API's are provided for tying in ECAD viewers so that the solution can work with other vendors viewing solutions.
   
Additional enhancements complete comprehensive Teamcenter release
 
In addition to its robust mechatronics management capabilities, the latest release of Teamcenter also includes a wide variety of enhancements throughout the product portfolio.
   
* The visualization capability includes enhanced visual quality with dynamic shadows, better leverage of tightly managed Teamcenter assets in published docs, and native application platform support on X86-64 hardware, including Windows(R) XP Pro and Novell's SUSE(TM) Linux(TM).
* The collaboration module widens its platform support with the addition of Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005, and Mac OS web browser. A Linux client is also available.  There are privacy controls and application sharing enhancements, plus Technical portfolio collaboration, and Windows Messenger and Office Communicator integration. This release also meets the U.S. Federal Information Processing Standards for data encryption and security standards and is FCAP FIPS140-2 certified.
* Project management contains a number of improvements in usability,performance, and printing capabilities. European calendars have been added and there are enhancements in Program Execution Management (PEM).
* Enhancements in system engineering expand its ease of use through dynamic pick lists, default views on folders, display filtering, report scripting and inline text editing.  Microsoft Visio-live diagram updates, and interfaces for the MathWorks, Inc MATLAB(R) and Simulink(R) products are also new to this release.
* Enterprise level data management includes ease-of-use enhancements,reducing the training requirements, improving user efficiency and lowering the cost of deployment. Also, new to this release are its technical publishing, content management and SGML/XML capabilities.
* Engineering data management provides complete engineering process management for CAE, MCAD and ECAD, plus continued lower cost of ownership and deployment flexibility. This release features ECAD and software management including ClearCase and embedded software management. New also is Linux platform support.