The Benefits of PLM on AWS for Manufacturers

Manufacturers often utilize Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software for key benefits such as improved product quality, effective collaboration, reduced development costs, and faster time to market. The PLM solutions on AWS can help businesses meet availability and compliance requirements, while also achieving increased PLM performance, reducing cost and eliminating data silos.

PLM solutions on AWS, powered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage service, offer a combination of high-performance, scalable storage with the robust data management features of PLM software to enhance collaboration, accelerate development cycles, and reduce costs. This strategic integration empowers engineering teams to innovate more effectively, ensuring data integrity, security and availability while optimizing overall operational efficiency.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools enable businesses to manage the entire lifecycle of a product, from initial concept through retirement, by facilitating improved collaboration, innovation, and efficiency across design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and change management processes. Industrial and manufacturing companies can modernize their PLM solutions like Siemens Teamcenter by migrating to AWS and benefit from reduced IT costs, improved performance, scalability and security while still meeting compliance requirements and supporting globally distributed teams.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

NetApp has a longstanding reputation for supporting mission-critical applications in enterprise environments, drawing upon over three decades of experience in providing reliable and scalable storage solutions. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP brings the robustness and advanced data management capabilities of NetApp’s ONTAP operating system to the cloud, ensuring that PLM systems are both performant and resilient. A Forrester study underscores the impact of this integration, with organizations utilizing Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP achieving up to a 45% increase in operational efficiency and up to a 40% reduction in migration time to value, facilitated by NetApp’s industry-leading features like SnapMirror for seamless data replication. These benefits are particularly important for PLM environments, where the need for continuous, uninterrupted access to critical data and applications is paramount. By leveraging Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, businesses can ensure that their PLM systems are not only reliable and high-performing but also capable of supporting the complex, data-intensive processes that drive product innovation and development, ultimately helping companies bring products to market faster, reduce operational costs, and maintain a competitive edge in a global marketplace.

Collaboration and data integrity in product design and engineering

In the product design and engineering phase, speed, collaboration, and data integrity are essential. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides high-performance, scalable storage solutions that support the intensive data requirements of CAD, CAE and PLM applications. The storage service enables engineering teams to collaborate in real-time, access and share design files seamlessly across geographies. This reduces design iteration cycles and enhances productivity, while the robust data protection and disaster recovery features ensure critical design data is always available and secure.

Collaboration and integration are critical throughout a product’s lifecycle, extending beyond the design and engineering teams to involve internal stakeholders and external partners across diverse locations and systems. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP enables easy integration to systems such as PLM, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), by providing low-latency, cost-efficient data access, increasing transparency, and boosting productivity. Furthermore, the flexible storage architecture and high-performance file system can handle the varied data types and I/O patterns of PLM systems, ensuring optimal performance to effectively serve the diverse data needs across the product’s entire lifecycle, from CAD/CAE/CAM files and specifications to Bill of Materials, Manufacturing Process Plans, and more.

Well-Architected PLM Solution on AWS

This Whitepaper (which explains Siemens Teamcenter deployment with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in an enterprise environment) describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running PLM workloads in the cloud. In general, enabling NetApp ONTAP features such as deduplication, compression, and automated data tiering will optimize storage costs and reduce operational overhead. Its high-performance, scalable storage enhances the speed and responsiveness of PLM applications, while built-in redundancy and disaster recovery ensure data integrity and availability. Essential security features, such as encryption, access controls, auditing, and logging, establish a secure foundation to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical PLM data. Additionally, manufacturers can take advantage of the sustainable infrastructure of the AWS Cloud where our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center helping to achieve ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) corporate goals.

Automotive Customer Example

Faced with the need to modernize and optimize their PLM system, a leading automotive technology supplier recently migrated their Siemens Teamcenter platform from an on-premises environment to AWS. This decision was driven by the company’s desire to leverage cloud scalability, enhance operational efficiency, and improve time-to-market for their products. The company initially considered other storage solutions but found it lacked the necessary multiprotocol support and efficient cloning capabilities crucial for their operations. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP emerged as the preferred choice due to its advanced features such as multiprotocol support and FlexClone technology. These features were instrumental in reducing time-to-market and enhancing collaboration among the engineering teams. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP’s ability to deliver high performance and scalability ensured that the company’s engineering teams could work without delays, even with large-scale data, while the Multi-Availability Zone option provided the necessary high availability and data resilience for this mission-critical workload.

Figure 1: Siemens Teamcenter Architecture

Special thanks to:
• Dimitrios Dovas (Teamcenter X Product Management, Siemens)
• Donna Yasay (AWS Senior Leader, Solutions Architect – Automotive and Manufacturing)
• Mekka Williams (Director – Innovation and Solutions, Office of the CTO, NetApp, Inc)
• Yue Ning (AWS Senior Solutions Architect – Automotive and Manufacturing)
• Charles Inglis (AWS Product Manager –- Technical for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP)
• Arunkumar Krishnan  (AWS Senior Solutions Architect – HPC Storage SME)