Siemens Expands Centric Deployment

Transportation division cites accelerated prototype processes, error reduction from use of collaboration solution

San Jose, CA — April 23, 2003 — Siemens has increased its deployment of a collaborative product design solution from Centric Software, following up on an initial implementation begun last year at the German giant's railway transportation division.

The full deployment follows Siemens' phase-one implementation of Centric's Functional Prototyping solution made in mid 2002 at Siemens' Transportation Systems (TS) division.

The TS unit utilizes the solution to create a cross-functional product definition and system-level simulation environment, bringing together rigid and flexible railway car body analysis to validate total product functionality during the concept phase of railway car manufacturing.

Based on improvement over previous processes, reduced development costs and collapsed time-to-market gained in phase one, Siemens TS is increasing the use of Functional Prototyping at five of its development centers throughout Germany and Austria.

Heinz-Simon Keil, department head of corporate technology for production processes and virtual engineering at Siemens said the software has allowed the TS division to accelerate the overall virtual prototyping process and correct potentially costly errors on the fly before such errors are discovered in manufacturing.

"We are highly impressed with the core Centric Innovation technology and are also planning to deploy the Centric Software Innovation Management solution on a corporate level in the near future," Keil added.

Centric's Innovation solutions consist of Innovation Management to collect, review and decide on innovative ideas; Design-to-Order to breakdown product requirements and map them to fulfill target customer needs; and Functional Prototyping to validate new product concepts for technical and business feasibility.

"Centric Innovation complements and supports the Siemens strategy to define a complete 'Digital Master' of a new product: providing portfolio analysis, project and technical definition, and complete digital system level validation," said Chris Groves, Centric's president and CEO.



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