New Teamcenter Extension Makes Low-Code Development Even Easier

The most widely used product lifecycle management software in the manufacturing industry is Siemens Teamcenter. Manufacturers use Teamcenter to connect people, processes, and data across their organizations.

Teamcenter customers have long been able to connect to the Mendix application development platform, letting them create low-code solutions that meet their unique business needs.

Mendix has now released Teamcenter Extension. This low-code layer atop the Teamcenter Connector connects and consumes the Teamcenter APIs. This makes creating low-code solutions faster and more intuitive than ever before.

Adding Mendix low-code to Teamcenter empowers domain experts, no matter what their development experience, to collaborate in building cross-domain applications.

Mendix offers Teamcenter users:

Marketplace templates for kickstarting development in Mendix
A 3D viewer and widgets
Multicloud deployment of apps—public, private, and on-premise

Welcome aboard your new Teamcenter expert

Until now, the full benefit of pairing Mendix low-code with Teamcenter has been limited to those users with an in-depth understanding of both systems. A technical comfort with one but not the other could slow a user down and cut them off from the complete range of possibilities.

Teamcenter Extension removes that roadblock by filling the role of the “expert.” It automates the previously manual tasks of:

Searching and examining business objects and properties in Teamcenter
Using them to create domain models and microflows in Mendix

With the extension, connecting Mendix and Teamcenter becomes as simple as a few clicks of the mouse.

Teamcenter data now at your fingertips

To create low-code Teamcenter apps with Mendix, developers must access the Teamcenter data model. However, without expert knowledge of Teamcenter, this task can be challenging. Teamcenter Extension acts as your expert. It knows:

Where to find the data you need
How to access it
How to modify it
Even how to create it!

Since it’s a Mendix product, the extension also has all the user-friendly Mendix tricks at its disposal. The intuitive UI allows the developer to automatically create Mendix low-code components such as microflows and domain models. The developer can then stitch those components into a working Mendix application simply by checking boxes and dragging-and-dropping icons.

The savings in time and effort the extension provides are substantial. For example, where creating a microflow that accessed Teamcenter data would have taken nearly an hour, you can now finish it in ten minutes.

Creating solutions made even simpler

To make it even easier for Mendix developers to start creating their low-code solutions, the initial release of the extension comes with out-of-the-box actions for which they can quickly build Mendix artifacts:

Retrieve

Get Item Revisions
Get Workplace Objects

Create/Update

Create Item and Item Revision
Update Item/ItemRevision
Revise ItemRevision

Structures

Get Structures

To further aid developers, we’ve also made available a sample app that demonstrates the capabilities of the extension.

We’ll continue to simplify the creation of Teamcenter low-code applications by making additional integration options for more use cases available in future updates of the extension.

3 examples of the extension at work

Let’s look at a few examples of the kind of initiatives that the Mendix Teamcenter Extension will make even easier for manufacturers.

Extend data

It will be simpler for manufacturers to combine their Teamcenter data with third-party data. This will let them:

Combine PLM data with company-specific data points such as supplier pricing or sustainability data
Include data, such as photos and GPS data, captured by devices