Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, recently announced a new product in the Teamcenter software portfolio called Active Workspace, an intuitive, highly visual, and personalized environment for instantly accessing intelligent 3-D information and thereby greatly enhancing the value of PLM systems. Active Workspace is another important step towards realizing Siemens PLM Software's High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) vision, which was established to help decision makers make better informed decisions more efficiently and with a higher level of confidence.

Today, many companies have massive amounts of information generated throughout their product lifecycle processes, which currently lies dormant, often spread across many sites and several different unconnected databases. This information could potentially be used to enhance decision making. However, finding, understanding and acting on all of this information can be difficult, time consuming and ultimately expensive. Active Workspace, working in conjunction with other Siemens PLM Software's technology, provides an efficient solution by bringing all of this information together in instantly available visual representations that enable comprehension and quality decision-making to drive innovation.

"All companies and individuals face the challenge of dealing with information overload due to the increasing speed and volume of data coming from multiple sources," said Chuck Grindstaff, CEO, Siemens PLM Software. "Active Workspace helps companies manage this challenge and significantly enhances decision making by reducing complexity and intelligently presenting PLM information that is accessible for all users. Building on our HD-PLM vision, Active Workspace creates an intuitive and personalized 3-D graphic interface that significantly enhances the ability of our PLM suite of offerings to deliver knowledge instantly to the right people, at the right place and in the right context to support rapid and intelligent decision making."

As product complexity continues to increase, the PLM systems that support the design, development and manufacturing of these products continue to expand to handle more data, functions and users. Visualizing information is crucial to understanding this complexity, whether information is textual, a network diagram of related items, or a complex 3-D product design. Active Workspace provides easy to use tools for visualizing and navigating information and, once the right information is found, easily saving or sharing it with others.

"The constant increase in product complexity creates a need for a strong multi-disciplinary decision support platform that makes information exchange and collaboration simple, intuitive and effective," said Joe Barkai, practice director, product lifecycle strategies, IDC Manufacturing Insights. "A dynamic decision support system, like Active Workspace, creates rich technical and business context to enable intelligent, high-fidelity decision making."

Active Workspace is highly scalable and can handle all types and sizes of PLM environments, from hundreds to millions of items of information, and from a massive collection of documents to complex 3-D geometry. Active Workspace helps turn this complexity into a competitive advantage by using the built-in filtering capability to provide immediate results, enabling fast, high-performance visualization of the 3-D data and combining it with relevant product information to proactively assist users in making good decisions.

Smart collaboration is an integral part of the system - assisting users in finding relevant team members who need to be involved in a given task or decision. Active Workspace simplifies the process of sharing the data needed to make a decision so it can be re-used in the future to leverage best practices for similar tasks.