From UGS’s Monday press release (Link):

Tecnomatix 7.6 leverages a natural extension of the Teamcenter PLM backbone, enabling tight collaboration across the design/build process where manufacturing and design engineers can create and plan production processes concurrent with product design. Moreover, with Tecnomatix 7.6 manufacturers can virtually create, plan, validate and execute production processes, for workcells, machines, production lines and entire plants before purchasing and commissioning a single piece of physical equipment.”
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Extending the knowledge capture, management and distribution features of Teamcenter into process planning and the production environment provides a virtual ‘manufacturing backbone’ to support the world-class functionality of Tecnomatix.
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The result is a more complete PLM solution that shares data models between product and process design and manufacturing execution with feedback loops that facilitate continuous process improvement and support global innovation networks.

If you’re familiar with the robot factory in The Sims, this starts to sound like that kind of capability. Only the robots on the screen are getting built in some factory … somewhere. Parts of it may even be fabbed.

For some perspective, this is from their February 20 press release (Link):

“today announced its Lifecycle Simulation strategy to provide the PLM industry’s first end-to-end integrated digital simulation solution, enabling real-time product development simulation in a collaborative, visual, managed and open environment.

UGS definitely seems to be leading the industry in PLM and virtual/real production integration. I just wish I knew more details. I’ll have to do a bit of research; maybe find a demo video or something. It sounds great, but I don’t have a good feel for what the software really does. Time I get a better handle on what they’re doing.