Teamcenter Document Management

Hello, and welcome to today's Saratech Enablement Session. My name is Andrea Hall, and I'm the Customer Relationship Manager here at Saratech, and I'll be your host today.

Presenting today, we have Andrew Carlson, who is an Applications Engineer here at Saratech and talk to you about Teamcenter and Document Management.

On top of that, I know this is a very unique situation that we're all in with my team right now. And I want to let you know that for our main customer, Saratech is here to support you if you need it. We are lucky enough to be able to work remotely.

So we are all here and ready to support you in any way that you need. We'll also be posting some updates on our website a little bit later today. We're here to support you if you need anything. I'm not. going to pass it over to you.

All right.

Thank you so much, Andrea. As Andrea mentioned, I'm Andrew Carlson, I've been with Saratech for about the last seven months working as an applications engineer, specifically with Teamcenter, and I'm excited to go over some document management with you guys today.

So, the agenda is gonna look a little bit like this. We're going to explain what document management is. Some of the things that are appended to that, as far as different aspects that are involved with Document management.

We're then gonna go into some applicable implementations, which, I've set aside about three examples that we can look over in a real life setting. And what those entail, how they would benefit a company. and really, how other companies are using them to streamline their processes? With documents. I have a small demo in there as well.

We'll look over live demonstration for about 3 to 5 minutes, involving one of these examples, and then we're going to go into elements of document management.

What constitutes an installation for document management and really gets it to work for us? This is more of an administrative side of things, but I think that it's going to be necessary and helpful for those that are going to be more on the administrative side and maybe installing or assembling some of these components.

Then, we're gonna look at IRDC, which I'll define later, as well as now. It's an item revision definition configuration, and essentially, it's the brain, the heart and soul, the bread and butter, of document management, and it controls the automation.

And then we might have some time for some questions and answers.

So, what does document management?

It's an automation of processes involving your documents and templates.

So, all companies have documents, templates, all this data that they have to transfer every day, from computer to computer.

A lot of times, they get these files get lost.

Revision control isn't followed. There are problems with disorganization and clutter, and that leads to rework.

It leads to different time expenditures that didn't need to be made.

So document management helps with this. It can also lead to file rendering.

If you can figure file rendering, what that essentially does is, it allows you to take a file format from, say, like a document, to a PDF, or something from a CAD to a J T. And for those that don't know what J T is, that's essentially just a universal 3D.

model that you can use from a CAD application to view any 3D model from any application.

Another aspect of docket management is batch print.

And that includes the ability to print directly from Teamcenter without having to use those third party applications, such as Adobe, or Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera.

Document markup is another essential aspect of document management and that includes stamps, watermarks, logo's, electronic signature, that sort of thing. that can also be configured. And then a really cool aspect to DACA management is full text search.

And what that allows us to do, is to look at the contents of a document and search based on what the document contains, and not just what the document is, which means the metadata, as well as the contents thereof.

So, let's look at example one.

Let's say we've got a company, every company I would assume has these Office templates that use, and let's say that we've got a couple of users.

Bob and Cassie, and Bob is sending templates over to. Kathy. Every, so often, he's sending an Excel template. Now, let's say that sometimes Bob can't find the Excel template, or Kathy gets it! She puts it back in one of her file directories and then she can't find it later.

Or let's say that Kathy requests this template from Bob and Bob gives her a revision that's out of date.

So, now there's different revisions being used and there's clutter. There's disorganization, this occurs on a daily basis. I know what occurred at my last job all the time when I worked with Northrop, and it's it's something that companies can really benefit from having document management installed to alleviate this situation.

So, I'm going to hop over into my internal sandbox, show a quick demo, that helps demonstrate how this is implemented.

So, this is Active workspace, it's kind of the user friendly side of Teamcenter, if you haven't seen it before.

And essentially, it's kind of got a Windows eight feel to it.

But if we go into our folders tab here, it's kinda like being on your homepage in a Teamcenter rich client.

What we would do is essentially create a new part.

And, I'll demonstrate this here by making an item, It can be a part an item.

It can be configured for any of these.

As you see, the standard behavior here is to add an ID and a revision for whatever parter item you're creating.

We'll give it a name now and we'll just call it we'll.

And if we scroll down, we'll notice that there's a template attribute here.

This is not a default attribute or out of the box. As we say.

This is something that we have placed onto this dialog box, in addition to the out of the box attributes.

And we can see that there's a drop-down where there are several different options as far as Office Documents that we can choose from.

So, let's say that we want to choose our Excel template.

We can go ahead and add that and see that now our new part has been created.

And we also have an attachment that's been made with the Excel document attached.

And so, while this loads, maybe there's a question that Andrea has.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't just say that, quote, That question pop up. It says, If I use the rich client instead of Active Workspace, how will the template drop-down up here?

That's a good question. It'll be the same as inactive workspace. There's a few different attributes that show up on the dialog box, but the Template drop-down will be there, just as it was an active workspace, and you'll be able to select any of those templates that you've that you've implemented, And I'll show later how those are actually installed into the dialog box.

Yes. Yes.

So, as we see now, this Excel document has been attached, and we can open it and see what the contents are.

I've taken a very generic template for Excel and added it here, so, you can make this, You know, configure it however you'd like in a custom fashion.

You can delete any of this. You can modify it. It can really appear as however you would like.

So again, it's a very unique aspect of document management allowing you to take full control of your templates and automate that process so that there isn't any disorganization clutter. Oh, And there's full revision control as well.

So now I'm going to go back and hop into the presentation.

And mmm hmm.

That was more of the user side of things.

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the administrative side and what goes into creating what we just saw.

So, what an administrator would do in order to set this up is, as you see on the panel on the left, there's something called an ..., DC based criteria page. This is just a dialog box that is on the backend. So there's something called the Beam IDE. It's the Business Modeler Integrated Development environment, and that's kind of the code application that allows Teamcenter a function.

On that application, there's something called ..., which is this item revision definition configuration.

Here's where the magic really happens, We configure any conditions, such as, do we want a template to be attached? Do we want a rendering to occur, that sort of thing.

We add the templates here. We also can configure naming roles, so that any naming rules we have on our parts, revisions, anything like that, we can follow those same naming rules and nomenclature and standardize that behavior.

We can also use deep copy rules here, which are essentially behaviors between revisions. If we have a revision A, and we've filled out the document that Excel document, but on the subsequent revision, we don't want there to be any writing anymore, We want it to be a fresh template. We can configure that here as well.

And as I said, renderings are another aspect of this.

We can create a format that goes from document or Excel, to a PDF without us having to touch anything.

So, another aspect of the solution includes something called style sheets. And this is not on the backend of Teamcenter, but rather, within Teamcenter itself. And this kind of controls the display of Teamcenter.

When we went and created that item, we saw there was a dialog box, and that dialog box asked us what revision, what ID we would like to give the item, or part, then it also had that Template drop-down.

These displays are controlled through style sheets, and that's something an administrator would do.

So, the final aspect of this demonstration, that I just went through, is a user going in, looking at Active Workspace opening, or creating a new part, and then selecting from this drop-down menu, and adding this template to their part.

Now, this would have to otherwise have been done manually, and they would had to have found the file and uploaded a dataset to it, and this is done away with using the automation that we've shown.

Hey, Andrew, we actually have another question.

Millimeter hmm, This is from my goal. He said, Does Teamcenter integrate with ERP systems, such as EpiCore?

That's a really good question.

I haven't been able to look into EpiCore yet, but that's something that I can find information for you and after the presentation. I'd be happy to get you more information about that.

Perfect. Michael will follow up with you.

That's a really good question.

So, here's another example.

With regard to document management, that's a little bit more in depth.

Let's say we've got a company that has PDFs that they would like to be generated from their office files, including any templates that they may have automatically generated and attached to their new parts. And let's say they want to do this in a workflow process. So, you can do this manually, but you can also configure this to be done in a workflow.

Let's say they would like to print these files from Teamcenter with their own watermarks.

And they don't really want to touch much of this process.

Well, this can all be done, and this is kinda how it would go, the user would create a part.

And just as we showed in our demonstration, this Word document would be auto generated and attached to that part revision, then what would happen is the user would submit this part, revision to a workflow.

And essentially from there on, this process would be automated.

The workflow handler's, basically some code in the background, will generate the PDF from the Word doc.

Then it would also put that watermarks stamp, or Digital Signature, what at whatever mark markup you would like and put it onto this PDF for you, and then you could print it directly from Teamcenter. So again, a very much more in-depth example here, that's extremely automated, and allows for you to go through things without having to make many clicks at all.

Another really cool aspect of document management is the full text search.

So, let's say just like in Star Wars when they have order 66, let's say we've got that order somewhere in here, many different pages, we want to search for that term, that phrase within these documents.

Well, we can do that if we configure this aspect to document management.

What's really cool is that we can actually combine it with the metadata searches.

So, when you search for a document, you might be interested in who made it, if it's released, what revision it is, that sort of thing.

Those are, those are all metadata aspects of the documents.

But if we include also our capability of full text search, then we can combine those aspects and make a very discrete search. That helps us eliminate a lot of time, wasted searching through different documents that may have some of the aspects we wanted to, but not all of them.

So in this example, we searched for the keyword or the content, word cat, but we also filter by owning user jack G, modified after a date. In this case, it might not be as helpful, because it's 2015, and I don't know anybody creating stuff before them these days. And then release status released pre-release, work in progress. We could, we could have a wide number or a large swath of different release statuses that we would like to search by. And so that is all configurable with document management, full text search.

So now I'm going to talk, again, a little bit more about the installation of these components that allow document management to, To take shape.

So this includes any plugins for the rendering Adobe Office products that we might have between Teamcenter and those products. So those are called plugins kind of a connections between them.

Then there's something called the Dispatcher, the dispatcher is essentially just another Teamcenter component that it takes. It takes control of the renderings and the file format extensions. So if we want to do it again. Those Excel documents and convert those. It's called translating. If we want to translate those into PDFs we would use the dispatcher to do so.

That final item, that's also connected with installation strategic Teamcenter, is the business model or IDE and that can be configured in tandem with Teamcenter. And as you see the third item, it's the third party software that obviously is separate from Teamcenter and would have to be configured for creating the documents that you're going to use but not necessarily for renderings or for other aspects of document management if you needed to use them such as watermarks and and other aspects that we've described.

So, I already sees an automation, as I described before, I already Cs are kind of the bread and butter of the entire process.

And we configure those in the business model or IDE.

They control the behavior of the files at different parts during the life cycle of a product. In other words, during creation of a part during, during a save action during revise, check in, check out, copy.

any type of action is really the instigator. The catalyst for these types of changes to occur or these types of file generations to occur or renderings are stamped attachments, those those sorts of things. So really, it's a behavior controlled aspect of document management, and that's how it works.

And really, what it does is it mitigates the manual labor involved in having to do this.

Again, rework and time lost because of no unfruitful searches having to go through tons of documents every day, just to find the same one that you were looking at yesterday. That happens all the time. And it still happens to me.

Document management can, essentially do away with that to a large, a large part by standardizing this file behavior, and automating the process involved. And using workflows really is a helpful aspect to this.

Andrew.

Yeah, another question here. You use the word rendering, and translating. Are they performing the same task?

Rendering and translating in this sense, yes, they are rendered content from one file format to another. But you could say translation is basically synonymous in the sense. You may hear rendering as far as visualization as well. A lot of times, that's, that's another word used to, say, to visualize an object and Teamcenter, Which is a little bit different, because, now you're saying, I'm taking something that's just an attachment, and now I'm looking at the real live display of it on Teamcenter, so, that we can get a little bit confusing. But, That was a good question, in that sense. Yes, it's just file format to another file format. OK, one more question. Can I can figure a CAD file to be attached automatically instead of Office files?

Absolutely, yeah.

There's no problem making a CAD file the default attachment You can, you know?

You can attach many different Office files or CAD files to be the automatic generated file for your part revision. So, yeah, that's another good question.

Um, so, the takeaway here is document management, allows you to automate the behavior of your product, your, your documents, and your files at any moment in that cycle.

So, it allows the renderings or translations as we described, of these files to different formats.

And it allows you to, to utilize your templates, your custom templates, your watermarks, logos, and other aspects of your document behavior, to really streamline the process for you, lessening the time that you need to search for these documents. And again, full text search really helps with this. A couple of companies that we know use this and it's very helpful for them.

And it eliminates rework clutter and last time because of the standardization. So again, just, kinda really nailing down why it's so beneficial to have this in place. And a lot of companies that I know are are using this document management, basically, to cut off all that that wasted time that is involved with, as I described before, losing documents and having revision control over them.

So, with that, that was essentially all that I had prepared on document management.

Everyone stay safe and stay healthy and please reach out if we can do anything for you during this time.

Thanks, Evi.

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