Aras
Breaking New Grounds in PLM

With a business model that deftly blends customer-centricity and innovation, Aras has mastered the art of listening to customers and redefining the PLM industry with technology that is resilient, scalable, and future-proof. With more than two decades of experience in growing high-tech companies into market leaders, Peter Schroer founded Aras with a vision to provide organizations with revolutionary PLM solutions that exceed their expectations and help businesses achieve faster time to market and greater product quality. Driven by Schroer’s wealth of experience in developing unique and disruptive software, Aras empowers customers to effectively manage the growing product complexity and fast changing technology that are prevalent in the business of engineering today.

“We bring together a unique enterprise technology and advanced model-based service oriented architecture to deliver a highly scalable, flexible, and secure PLM suite of solutions for our customers,” says Schroer. “Our experience of close to two decades in the PLM business provides us with a detailed insight of all the complexities involved in enterprise-wide PLM projects, and has the ability to resolve those issues through our ‘Aras Innovator’ PLM software,” continues Schroer. The software offers an integrated solution for PDM, PLM, and more on a single unified platform, which enables customers to develop consistent, repeatable processes across the complete product lifecycle. Further, Aras’ centralized database provides users with access to the most accurate and up-to-date product information, in order to efficiently collaborate and optimize resources, minimize operational errors, and reduce time to market, for improved products and increased profitability.

"Our long history in the PLM business provides us with a detailed insight of all the complexities involved in enterprise-wide PLM projects"

With a fundamentally different approach, Aras builds its scalable, full-featured, and easy-to-adopt PLM software to develop both technology and business models for enhanced operations. Aras’ PLM solutions have the ability to support global product development, systems engineering, multi-site manufacturing, supply chain operations, and quality compliance that help clients to gain a greater competitive advantage. By leveraging these out-of-the-box functionalities, and along with modern web-based, cloud-ready architecture, customers working with Aras can easily deploy and continuously enhance their PLM environment, unlike conventional enterprise PLM systems.

The New-Age PLM Platform

Enterprises today are looking for next-gen PLM tools to effectively manage the entire product lifecycle from ideation to finishing product and enhance the development of physical, electronic, logical, and content aspects of their products. Toshiba Machine, a leading industrial machines manufacturer, needed to streamline their design and manufacturing processes. To achieve the goal, the client turned to Aras and implemented its Innovator PLM software—an enterprise software suite for managing complicated product lifecycle management processes. Replacing the legacy systems, Aras effectively helped Toshiba Machine standardize their global design processes, increase the product quality, improve design processes for made-to order products, and enhance collaboration with ERP. “With our highly customizable and upgradable PLM solutions, we are confident that Aras will enable Toshiba Machine to achieve success as their business continues to grow and expand and streamline international collaboration with ERP,” says Schroer.

With our dedicated Community Development team, we will continue to guide our clients through their complete PLM journey

Aras’s PLM software allows organizations to develop consistent, repeatable processes that extend through the product lifecycle and enable collaboration across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines, as well as in the supply chain.

Model-Based Service-Oriented Architecture

To support the fluidity of technology and business, PLM solutions need to be able to easily adapt to the shifting landscape without requiring them to start over from scratch. Like ERP software and other systems, PLM can be one of the more costly and labor-intensive enterprise endeavors, in some cases taking years to deploy and requiring millions of dollars. As a result, organizations aren’t inclined to replace a PLM system once it is up and running. More than likely, they are tempted to make do with functionality limitations and outdated business processes rather than go through the pain and expense of a full-scale migration to a more advanced PLM platform.

Aras Innovator PLM has been architected from the ground up with resiliency in mind. The aim is to give companies the required scalability and flexibility, while ensuring upgradability even when applications are heavily customized. The combination of Aras Innovator’s unique model-based approach and Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) ensures flexibility and scalability whether running PLM applications out-of-the-box or highly customized.

This model-based SOA of the Aras Innovator platform is fundamentally different from traditional PLM systems. Instead of the limitations imposed by a conventional hard-coded schema and business logic, Aras technology makes application customization much faster, easier, and more sustainable. This is especially important in the light of findings from Gartner Research that show more than half the total cost of ownership over a five-year period for a conventional enterprise application like PLM is spent on consultants and internal resources tasked with maintaining and updating the system. Aras gives companies the flexibility to quickly adapt PLM processes to the requirements and gain a competitive advantage without worrying about upgradeability so they achieve greater ROI. Aras Innovator’s resilient approach to PLM reduces the complexity of maintaining and evolving the PLM backbone. With Aras Innovator, PLM becomes a sustainable investment that evolves with the business.

Carestream Health, an international manufacturer of medical and dental healthcare imaging equipment and non-destructive testing film, was facing issues related to globalization that precipitated a need to replace the legacy system that could not keep pace with the evolving needs of the business. The company needed a PLM system that could offer greater flexibility at a competitive price, according to Dave Sherburne, Carestream’s director of global R&D effectiveness and engineering IT. The firm initially tapped Aras Innovator to help streamline engineering release and change order processes, and has completely adopted the system over time to handle a variety of other functions across its global business. Carestream Health now uses Aras Innovator for all Product Level Information to help manage commercial parts, mechanical and electrical CAD releases, cross-discipline bill of materials, packaged parts, defects, and environmental health and safety.

Evolving the Platform

Aras prides itself in offering the most secured PLM platform. In fact, the Aras security, authentication, and data access rights model was defined to meet the needs of the defense industry customers to satisfy International Traffic in Arms Regulations and other military security compliance requirements. With a modern, flexible platform, customers have complete control over their Aras deployment—data center, cloud, or hybrid. Users can deploy on-site and migrate to a hybrid or full cloud model without losing any solution capabilities, or start in the cloud and move to their data center whenever the requirement erupts.

Adding to its extensive PLM portfolio, Aras recently announced a Technical Documentation application. Built on the Aras Innovator platform, the application is all set to provide a breakthrough in the authoring, visualizing, and publishing of a wide range of product, regulatory, safety, and technical information. “With our dedicated Community Development team, we will continue to guide our clients through their complete PLM journey, whether it’s their first roll out or an ongoing implementation,” concludes Schroer.