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On Wednesday, May 7th, we had our most recent Aras Community Network event in the Chicago-land area. This time around we've out grown last year's site, and had trouble getting a venue large enough to fit everyone. Luckily Microsoft stepped up and was generous enough host the event so there was plenty of room. Good thing too, because we had people from all over the world come!

Peter Get's Things Rolling!

We kicked off the day with Peter providing an update and talking about collaborative innovation. It's impossible not to get charged up when you start the morning with this much passion and intensity!

Over 10,000 enterprise system downloads, more than 30 corporate community projects, new product enhancements, and really exciting contributions from companies like Motorola, Lockheed Martin, Freudenberg, and numerous others.

The idea multiplier effect of having lots of companies participate on solutions to complex business process issues they are all facing is surfacing innovative approaches that are unlikely to come from a single company. This is the power of the open approach. This is what provides an order of magnitude greater innovation over other enterprise software packages companies have been using in the past. This is why "open" is better, period.

ACCO Brands Explains How Innovation & Time to Market Drive Global Growth

With over $2 billion in global sales from products like Swingline, Kensington, Wilson Jones, Quartet, and Rexel, ACCO Brands is focused on increasing global market share with innovative new products that they bring to market much more quickly. A key component of their business strategy relies on Aras Innovator to provide better access to the information people need in Europe, Asia or the US, whether in their office or on the road, including suppliers overseas.

Then, by combining collaboration with online workflow processes like their product change process and the Supplier Corrective Action Request (SCAR) process they are able to manage new product development and introduction more effectively around the world and throughout their global supply chain.

ACCO outlined how Aras gives them the ability to capture new ideas and concepts for the next big thing and provides the structure to get the job done quickly without miscommunications or mistakes.

Download >>> ACCO Brands Slides

XEROX Outlines Business Confidence Through Advanced SOA Approach with Aras

A broad vision for end-to-end enterprise PLM across the lifecycle combined with complex process and integration requirements is driving the Xerox strategy while the practical realities of today's economy are shaping their approach. Today, Xerox is the $17 billion leader in document management with products that span from color and black-and-white printing systems, laser and solid ink network printers, copiers, fax machines, and multifunction devices to "book factories" and digital publishing presses.

The company has a series of large systems already in place that the business relies on such as Teamcenter, PTC Windchill, and Oracle for ERP. Instead of trying to replace existing applications, Xerox is taking a different approach. They explained how they're using the Aras Innovator for business process management workflows and taking advantage of the advanced service-oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate with and wrap around other systems. That way Xerox is able to use the flexibility of the Aras workflows to automate their complex processes, starting with global change management, and tie in information from the other systems as needed without a lot of complicated programming.

Xerox describes this as a "connected" vs. "holistic" approach where they leverage the strengths of each system together to provide user friendly processes that are also easily maintained. They also provided an excellent example of how they have approached the enterprise evaluation, pilot proof of concept, and rollout for Aras Innovator.

Download >>> XEROX Slides

Esterline Aerospace & Defense Describes Corporate Transformation using Aras

Esterline is a global aerospace and defense company with $1.2 billion in annual revenues and over 10,000 employees around the world. Their strategy focuses on high-end industrial markets with growth driven through the acquisition of niche technology leaders. One of those businesses is BVR Technologies Company which is an emerging leader in advanced motion control and avionics products for aerospace, medical, and industrial automation applications. BVR has been operating with paper-based processes and email for years, and needed to automate their product information and processes to support their high growth and scale the business effectively.

BVR showed how they implemented their BOMs, parts with classification for electrical, mechanical, software, and firmware, as well as specifications, procedures, and other documents along with CAD integration for SolidWorks with no central IT support and a busy schedule. "We just laid out a plan, started, and kept going." They attribute the progress and results over the past year to a 'can do' attitude which was evident.

They are taking advantage of the open approach with future initiatives that involve community solutions for quality management and during the presentation one of the audience members offered to share and post their new additions to the meeting manager solution which BVR is planning to use!

Download >>> Esterline Slides

Second Annual Collaborate & Contribute Awards Presentation

We were proud to present the annual Collaborate & Contribute award to three corporate community members for their significant contributions over the past year.

Hayes Lemmerz International received the award for the modular process planner improvement to the quality planning solution which makes it easy to reuse common operations across PPAP documentation structures.

Broadway Consulting Services got the award for translating Aras Innovator into Traditional Chinese (Mandarin) and Simplified Chinese.

Freudenberg in Germany received the award for their work on the Meeting Manager solution, one of the most popular community solutions.

In the afternoon we had an overview of the Aras Innovator solution direction and discussed a variety of collaborative community projects, partner add-on solutions, and new improvements!

Of course there is no requirement to contribute back to the community, however, it's clear that everyone recognizes the benefits and that more collaboration and resulting contributions provide advantages for the entire corporate community. People discussed their company's business initiatives and where and how they plan to collaborate, there are many options for participation:

• Ideas, Concepts, Innovations
• Specifications, Documentation, and Use Cases
• Development, Testing & Verification
• Sharing Your Story, Blog Posts, Contribute to Forums

During the breakout sessions a wide range of topics was covered including integration connectors for ERP and CAD systems. Partners were the most active corporate community members in the integration area providing commercial solution add-ons to Aras Innovator.

xPLM discussed ERP integration strategies for SAP, Oracle, and Infor systems and touched on their CAD adaptors for CATIA, NX, and PRO/E. Several different approaches were discussed for CAD integration ranging from Design2Enterprise's 'publish upon release' format to ICP's managing 'work in process' with deep CAD data extraction capabilities.

Download >>> xPLM ERP & CAD Integration Slides

Other breakouts included the collaborative project for managing Bill of Materials complexity with Variants & Options presented by The GSI Group, and an overview of the open model approach. On the technical track Bill provided insights into optimizing for global deployments and the internationalization capabilities in Version 9.

Download >>> Open Model Advantages Slides