Teamcenter To Meet The Needs of Partners

The diagnostic group within Siemens Healthcare has grown through acquisitions in recent years, combining three disparate groups under a single umbrella. “Each had different backgrounds from a systems engineering viewpoint,” says Gerrit Salemink, director of engineering at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics. “And each had different ways to capture and monitor requirements. Tracking requirements or sharing of information among the different groups was difficult.”

The groups were using an internally-developed database system, Excel® spreadsheets and Word® documents, a mix that was difficult to maintain. “We wanted to harmonize the requirements engineering process,” notes Salemink. “A major motivator was the need to generate accurate and consistent bills of materials (BOMs).” An accurate and complete BOM is crucial for manufacturing any product, but even more so in the healthcare industry. Regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conduct thorough reviews of healthcare products prior to use on human subjects and require detailed information on every aspect of medical devices.

Re-using requirements enables the diagnostics group to better manage product variants, which improves productivity. “Now, everyone has access to the same data,” says Salemink. “Instead of managing three separate systems, everything our users need is in a single place.”

Users include medical technicians conducting chemical analysis in hospital laboratories, for example. “Teamcenter is going to help us move towards being more of a solution-driven organization that will be better able to capture user needs and deliver products that meet those needs,” says Salemink.

“Using Teamcenter has really facilitated the coming together of our three groups,” says Salemink. “It has been a key tool in helping us re-align. Teamcenter is very configurable and that helps improve productivity while enabling us to reduce errors and rework”.