Integration with any CAD Application
Aras Innovator is designed to support CAD integrations, and community members are building specific integrations. I am aware of a customer-developed UG interface, and implementation partners that have developed integrations to SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer and many of the market leading CAD and EDA Systems
. Aras overview of CAD and PDM
Link to partner pages with demo movies and brochures
xPLM
MaierCSS
Visualization component
Aras Innovator supports the use of 3rd party visualization packages. We have customers using Cimmetry AutoView and Adobe Acrobat, and others looking at Actify SpinFire as well as the viewers from the CAD companies.
NOTE: Feb 2009, Aras has announced a joint development partnership with Actify.
The system shall be able to manage work in process workflows for NX, Solidworks, PRO_E, AutoCAD, Mentor DX and Cadence.
Meets requirement. Aras Corp. partners with companies who are experts in CAD integration. These companies provide CAD integrations for all the major PLM systems, and are able to provide a high level support across major CAD platforms.
The system shall provide view capabilities with automatic launching of electronic markup capabilities to defining items, documents and CAD elements. (2D, 3D, Digital Mockup, Documents).
Meets requirement. Aras Innovator has an open file viewing API allowing integration with any commercial 2D and 3D file viewing technology, such as Adobe PDF, Cimmetry JVue, Spicer, etc. Aras has a corporate agreement with Actify for their SpinFire viewer. The integration for SpinFire will be distributed with future Aras Innovator downloads, and Actify has agreed to match the Aras enterprise open source distrubution model (no software license fees, just an annual support subscription). Use of Actify SpinFire is optional however, and any 3rd party viewer selected by the company can be integrated.
The system shall manage all commercial part attribute and classifications data along with CAD model sets for NX, Solidworks, PRO_E, AutoCAD, Mentor DX, and Cadence.
Meets requirement. As noted, Aras Corp. partners with companies who are experts in CAD integration. CAD integrations are used to provide automation over and above the built-in file server functions. With the CAD, Office and EDA application integrations, menu's are added within the application to allow direct access to the Aras Innovator vaults without logging in to PLM separately. The integrations also automate the extraction and database upload of attributes, and the maintenance of inter-file dependencies.
The system shall support mechanical and electrical collaborative design with disparate applications.
Meets requirement. Aras Corp. does not develop a CAD application and does not have a bias or alliance with any one CAD software tool. Aras Innovator is intended for multi-CAD environments, supporting both structure workflow driven collaboration and ad-hoc data and idea sharing.
The system shall have robust integrations with upstream, downstream and partner systems including:
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SAP
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Mentor DMS(CIDx)
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DOORS
Meets requirement. Aras Innovator has standard, certified Integrations for a variety of eCAD, MCAD, ERP, and other 3rd party solutions including SAP, Mentor, and DOORS that are available through the Aras Partner network. There are also community solution add-ons for Aras Innovator for requirements management and closed-loop Issue tracking, etc. Aras Corp. uses Aras Innovator as our internal Issue tracking system.
The system shall have full integrations for NX, Solidworks, PRO_E, AutoCAD, Mentor DX and Cadence.
Meets requirement.
The system shall be fully functional through a WEB portal with the possible exception of CAD integrations.
Meets requirement. All Aras Innovator functionality is accessed through the browser.
The system shall be able to manage large CAD/CAM/CAE models and assemblies effectively across the WAN.
Meets requirement. Aras Innovator also supports distributed file vaulting for optimized WAN performance.
The system shall be able to use 'master data' housed by other company systems.
Meets requirement. One of the core Innovator Web Services is the Federation Service. This is used to build bi-directional interfaces with external systems. The Federation service also has the capability to "wrap" an external object in a 3rd party system, and then for all other Aras Innovator services, this appears as an internally managed object. Federation would be used to "wrap" the master data stored in other company systems.
The system shall be capable of consuming Web Services exposed by other systems.
Meets requirement.
The system shall have a configurable and bi-directional integration with SAP.
Meets requirement. Aras partners with www.xPLM.com who offer an SAP NetWeaver certified integration for Aras Innovator.