Mark Reisig さんのアクティビティ

Digital Traumatization

Mark Reisig — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 18:12:00 GMT

Whether it’s attempting to remember how to perform some routine function with your Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, making decisions without accurate data, your stalled digitalization efforts, or attempting to collaborate across departmental boundaries, you’ve likely experienced a certain level of trauma that I call “Digital Traumatization.”

I believe that much of this can be avoided if companies maintain focus on the end-users’ pain points while simultaneously keeping in mind a few basic principles, which I will address below.

By doing so, my hope is that you can reduce risk and disruption while transforming your business, providing more business value, achieving greater business resiliency, and becoming more agile with happier and more motivated high-performance teams.

Why end-users?

Clearly, you should target your business’ biggest pain points, but no successful transformation is ever as top-down as you might think. Dictating tasks to people with a myopic view of the organization’s digitalization or digital transformation goals is not a formula for success. People buy into transformations when they understand the impact on themselves, their teammates, the company as a whole, society, and their customers. People who are aware of how they relate to the bigger picture are far more likely to buy in, become passionate, and contribute to a movement (transformation). You should know how this impacts your end-users. If not, you’re increasing your risk of digital traumatization.

What business are you in?

This sounds simple, but if we think about all the companies that no longer exist and those facing extinction, they clearly got this one wrong. All thriving businesses evolve to meet the needs of their future customers, which could involve the adoption of new technologies, new trends, and/or new business models. As an example, let’s take a business model trend—Platform-as-a-Service—and think about how you need to change to support this new model? The focus shifts from building products that you ship and forgetting to build an ecosystem of platforms that harness better insights to data and the ability to support an as-running model beyond the initial point of sale.

Will your PLM software support the new model? Does it adapt as quickly as you need it to? Does it really cover the lifecycle of the product or are you throwing data over organizational walls? Can everyone collaborate in context at the speed you need to outrun your competition?

Legacy products are transformation killers.

Post-Digital Traumatization

Ease of use

The software you rely on must be easy to use. The term “swivel chair” is often used to mean accessing data in one system and manually inputting it into another. There are many forms of this, including the pervasive use of Excel spreadsheets and countless processes that misuse data. Today’s businesses and knowledge workers require access to the correct data using common interfaces on modern end-to-end PLM platforms. As an example, if you’re using PLM software and don’t have a consistent user interface across applications, you’re not just creating pain for your users, you’re losing productivity, increasing human error, slowing down your business, increasing your operational costs, and wasting everyone’s time.

Platform vs. Portfolio

A company’s IT landscape is typically made up of hundreds of applications that have been deployed for seemingly good but tactical reasons. Usually, the longer a company has existed, the more reorganizations and acquisitions they’ve had, the more siloed they become with a myriad of best-of-breed disconnected products and portfolios of products from their vendors of choice. This results in countless integrations, inflexible processes, and data lakes, which, in many cases, end up as data swamps—where data goes to die. This accumulation of product portfolios creates an ecosystem that leaks product data, causing a tremendous amount of inefficiency, cost of quality issues, inhibiting an organization’s ability to transform.

These complex product ecosystems can be greatly simplified with the use of platforms. Companies like Salesforce, Service Now, and Aras provide real platforms with common interfaces and Enterprise SaaS offerings that enable greater collaboration across the enterprise. Shown below is a basic diagram of a platform versus portfolio architecture.

Of course, you may think I am biased, but anyone who knows me well will tell you that this thinking started long before I joined Aras. I saw and felt the pain of digital traumatization in many companies and with several software providers primarily in the PLM and ERP market space. Regardless of any organization, I am a firm believer that building on top of a platform, especially one that is open, flexible, scalable, upgradeable, and supports a robust digital thread, gives you innumerable advantages in any digitalization effort. First and foremost, you will immediately make your business more resilient.

Here is a commentary titled, An Enterprise Digital Transformation Platform - CIMdata 2022 which outlines the advantages of a digital transformation platform.

Digital Thread

A key principle in your ability to transform is having a means to traverse and make sense of the growing amount of product data from engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and services. Your digital thread, which is really a web of digital threads, enables a framework to help manage your product data, facilitating greater collaboration and better insights across the product lifecycle.

The Digital Thread connects and traces the entire product lifecycle in multiple dimensions as Gartner describes in Innovation Insight for the Digital Thread - Gartner June 2021. It’s more than a single thread traveling across the lifecycle, more than seeing the evolution of a part of an asset back to manufacturing, engineering, functions, logicals, and requirements, but also across engineering disciplines, manufacturing, and your supply chain. It is truly a web of digital threads as Gartner illustrates below.

The hard reality, which CIMdata identifies in their commentary, Digital Thread Are You Progressing? -CIMdata 2021, is that their research shows companies continue to struggle when it comes to digital thread projects.

“This lack of digitalization success is interesting and in CIMdata’s experience at least one of the following three elements has failed: people, process, or technology. Often, legacy technology cannot be adapted to support people and process needs. In general, investigation to determine why the projects are not going as planned and to develop a comprehensive strategy to move forward are required. This will likely result in significant updates to a company’s digital strategy, and in the worst case a restart may be needed.” - CIMdata 2021

The important principle: this isn’t something you build from scratch. As much as possible, this should be part of the platform you use across your product lifecycle. As in the diagram below, this is visual traceability not dependent on Aras applications. This is the power of a platform that can provide bi-directional traceability of any item across the product lifecycle.

“The Aras platform is proven to deliver the technological capabilities required to create and manage digital threads. CIMdata has talked with many Aras customers that have created digital threads. They often comment on the ease of development the low-code platform enables and how they can embrace and extend legacy solutions and configure new solutions. Companies looking to create or extend digital threads need to develop a holistic plan that addresses all the dimensions of the issues, and should evaluate the Aras platform as a solution to enable their plan.” - CIMdata 2021

To learn more here is a case study on how JAMCO, a global supplier of aircraft interiors, make use of their Digital Thread, Aras Innovator Connects a Diverse Range of Systems with Digital Thread as “Global Design Portal.”

Ditch the Legacy Technology

Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) Legacy technologies are the major obstacles that prevent organizations from continually transforming. Reduce the trauma—stop investing in technology, particularly PLM software that limits your people, processes, and use of data.

“CIMdata often sees failures due to legacy technology and strategies. A key takeaway is to not get stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. Continuing to invest in a failed strategy is not a good business decision. Write the loss off and move forward with a more considered approach. For PLM, the product innovation platform is the best-in-class strategy.[5] Business processes must be designed to meet the company vision and business objectives and those processes implemented with a product innovation platform that is configurable and sustainable.” - CIMdata 2021

Enterprise SaaS

To keep pace, it’s no longer just about moving to the cloud, but adopting a SaaS Platform that spans your enterprise product ecosystem. This frees up your resources to focus on what matters most to your organization. Some PLM vendors provide an OOTB SaaS offering. That sounds less expensive. However, the reality is quite the opposite. OOTB drives up costs dramatically because you have no choice but to adapt to the software rather than the software helping you adapt and transform when the market dictates. Additionally, some providers are just hosting virtual machines in the cloud as opposed to a native containerized cloud architecture, therefore eliminating many of the benefits of cloud architecture such as elasticity. Others have created a subset of the functionality they previously had on-premise which makes a hybrid or migration extremely difficult, if not impossible. I submit these examples are nothing better than the same legacy products that have littered your on-premise IT landscapes of the past.

What is required is an “Enterprise SaaS” offering, one that you can configure, customize, and let the vendor upgrade on your schedule, including anything you customize. That’s far less expensive than OOTB! You get it your way at no additional cost. It should be a platform with many applications using the same user interfaces that span your product lifecycle. It should also be open and extensible so you can build your own applications and sunset legacy applications, thus increasing collaboration among users utilizing a digital thread with the traceability and collaboration that will enable you to adapt as your company requires.

“Companies looking for a SaaS-based PLM platform that supports extensive configuration to meet complex business requirements should look at Aras’ Enterprise SaaS platform.” - CIMdata 2022

At Aras, we provide a flexible and resilient platform, Aras Innovator, with an Enterprise SaaS offering, that consists of many applications and a digital thread spanning the entire product lifecycle. This enables companies to continuously transform their businesses, make better data-driven decisions, and adapt their product ecosystem as quickly as possible.

“Companies planning a Digital transformation should consider Aras Innovator as a solution to their digital transformation requirements.” - CIMdata 2022

You cannot transform a business on legacy standalone tools, therefore understanding and matching your business goals with open, flexible, and resilient technology across your product lifecycle is paramount.

I hope these principles help you avoid digital traumatization.

I would also like to invite you to join Peter Bilello, the President and CEO of CIMdata and myself this Thursday for a webinar to discuss why SaaS for PLM is a critical enabler for today’s business transformation. You can sign up for the event here. Check it out!

2022 Predictions in Business and Technology

Mark Reisig — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:48:00 GMT

Introduction
Over the past year, it’s become clear that the pandemic—the greatest disruption in my lifetime—has not only driven us to work, learn, and consume remotely, but has reshaped our economy and our own behaviors much the way the Great Depression and World War II restructured the lives of previous generations. In 2021, Aras had a banner year with many companies choosing our platform to transform their businesses—many in the cloud and many in the form of enterprise SaaS. As we enter 2022, companies have had the opportunity to revisit past inefficiencies and proactively pursue new, more resilient alternatives.

Proactive Continuous Digital Transformations Accelerate
Prior to the pandemic, companies were focused on big-bang digital transformation projects with high costs and horrific failure rates. Companies found themselves in a panicked shift to remote work and other gap-plugging measures to keep their businesses running. From these initial stages of inefficiency and inconsistency came a greater understanding of the need for more sustainable ways of working. Companies now prioritize business resiliency—the ability to adapt to unexpected disruptions. In 2021, faced with remote work, climate change, global supply chain shortages, and the unrelenting demand for more complex, connected products and services from more digitally savvy consumers, we saw a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to transformation.

In 2022, we will see an acceleration of proactive digital transformations. These transformation efforts will result in greater efficiencies and increased productivity at less cost with less time to value. The transformations will be more focused and continuous, resulting in greater connectivity, collaboration, visibility, flexibility, and the agility to both navigate future disruptions and take advantage of technology providing new and better product-as-a-service offerings. We all now share a common understanding that we don’t really know what the future holds, but we do understand the need to transform in a way that’ll enhance our business resiliency and agility.

The Talent War
A company’s most important asset is its people. The combination of “The Great Resignation,” where millions of mid-career employees are leaving their jobs at the same time baby boomers are retiring, has resulted in the highest voluntary “quit rate” on record, coinciding with record low unemployment. Many things go into building a winning team but attracting and retaining talent are fundamental. Without strong talent, you simply will not win. This, of course, is pushing companies to rethink many aspects of attracting and retaining talent and how to invest in technology to make their knowledge workers as efficient as possible.

As it relates to PLM, in 2022, the trend will be to provide new workers with non-tribal knowledge. Companies will be shifting to a more geographically dispersed workforce with more efficient, easier, and better ways to access data across their digital thread. 2022 is the year employees and companies that recognize how to amplify the productivity of these scarce knowledge workers with state-of-the-art technology will be ahead of the curve.

Adoption of Enterprise SaaS in PLM
It’s no secret that both cloud and SaaS cloud adoption in PLM have lagged other areas such as CRM and HRMS solutions. Due to the pandemic and the need to provide resilient solutions that scale globally, companies are now migrating to the cloud. Most of them prefer a SaaS solution that will simplify their IT infrastructure.

The challenge they face is two-fold. First, despite claims to the contrary, most SaaS PLM offerings lack the functionality of their on-site counterparts, or they haven’t yet been re-architected to leverage cloud services, instead offering virtual machines in the cloud. Second, companies want the advantages of a SaaS offering with robust out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality with regular updates; but they also need the flexibility to adapt—to customize their solutions in a low-cost sustainable manner to meet their enterprise needs. This will enable their PLM platform to be a digital transformation platform.

The problem is SaaS offerings limit or prevent customizations for company-specific requirements and force OOTB customer upgrades onto the provider’s schedule. The fundamental problem is a company’s requirements are changing at an accelerating pace, so this is outdated thinking if you wish to sustainably and continuously transform.

Fortunately, Aras Enterprise SaaS offers the best of both worlds—a true platform architected for the cloud with a SaaS offering that includes unlimited sustainable customizations and upgrades on the customer’s schedule with the same exact capability as the standard offering. We anticipate that the huge shift to enterprise SaaS, which we began to see in 2021, will only accelerate in 2022. For more information, check out our Aras Enterprise SaaS brochure and learn more about the ways in which it supports the new vision of PLM digital transformations and the move to the cloud and, in particular, enterprise SaaS.

Sustainability
Every organization must seek to eliminate or reduce the environmental costs of doing business. Decarbonizing the supply chain is a sensible place to start, but forward-thinking businesses are looking beyond the supply chain to improve sustainability across all business operations. And of course, sustainability is linked to resilience—that is, being able to adapt and survive for the long-term. Any business that ignores sustainability is unlikely to do well in this age of conscious consumption.

Supply Chain and PLM will Focus on Resiliency
Over the past year, many of us have witnessed and felt what it’s like to face empty shelves, rising energy bills, and shortages in everyday services. The supply chain crisis started with the lockdown’s impact on the manufacturing industry and continued with labor shortages such as truck drivers, which stalled traffic flow through the world’s busiest ports. A wide array of materials, parts, and goods fell into short supply, ranging from common household items to semiconductor chips. Just as in the talent war, the world has shifted from a mindset of abundance-thinking, where lowest cost rules, to one focused on scarcity.

Presently, the biggest supply chain trend is resiliency. Material backlogs and labor shortages will continue to force companies to pivot. In a recent report by Capgemini Research Institute, 62% of respondents said supply chain resilience would be a key priority in the wake of the pandemic. With respect to PLM, in 2022 we will see PLM play a bigger role because supply chain resiliency requires greater visibility across the enterprise. More than 90% of supply chain executives said visibility into their supply chain is important to their success, yet less than a third have achieved true visibility. In order to be more resilient and more agile, you need greater insight across your product lifecycle. If you’re going to develop a more diverse sourcing of products and transportation modes, you’ll need to have your supply chain and sourcing connected to your digital thread. In 2022, this will become an area many companies will focus on transforming.

Digital Threads
As companies seek to transform their product landscape to develop smart connected products and offer more platform-as-a-service offerings (PaaS) and manage their as-running assets (digital twins), they must shift toward using all of their product data in the most efficient manner possible. Accenture refers to this as Thread First Thinking.

As companies look to transform, their digital thread is at the heart of the efficiencies and resiliency they hope to gain. This is one area that can’t be ignored. Here are some of the benefits cited by Accenture:

Cost Optimization*

20%–40% reduction in costs for data duplication and overlapping toolsets
Up to 5x the speed of data capture and curation through thread automation
2–3x data reuse through cross-functional access to data
15–40% improvement in time to market via enhanced design team coordination
10–50% reduction in product renovation activities through data-driven design

Post-Sales Revenue Growth*

30–45% increase in accuracy in predicting service or spare parts needs
10–25% reduction in customer churn through more focused customer offerings
Up to 5x increase in services revenue through new service offers targeted towards specific consumers
10–20% increase in market share through superior service offerings

* dependent on industry

In 2022, we will see more companies reinventing their PLM systems with a “Thread First” strategy.

Digital Twin
The digital twin market was expected to grow at a CAGR of 61.94% from 2020 – 2025, reaching $29.5 billion market in 2025. Overall, the digital twin market has had a couple of setbacks. First, the pandemic put the brakes on many digital twin transformations. Also, in many cases, the overreliance on performance twins and IoT without regard for keeping the as-running digital twin up-to-date and the lack of a connection to the digital thread have resulted in some false starts.

Now is when the digital twin market will take off driven by the increasing demand for asset optimization, the rise of smart, connected products, and a better understanding that the “configured” digital twin and its digital thread enabling traceability across the product lifecycle is fundamental.

Evolving Business Models
Most businesses are transitioning where customer engagement is more important than ever and the product-as-a-service model continues to take off. Personalization has become key to gaining customer loyalty with always-on connectivity becoming an expected feature. Companies are now building out ecosystems for many connected products making platforms, the digital thread and enterprise SaaS critical to their success. The realization that existing, disconnected traditional technologies and static processes won’t adapt and scale quick enough to meet companies’ transformation needs at this time.

Conclusion
In 2022, companies will transition from thinking about ”what if” scenarios, to taking more proactive steps toward more focused and continuous transformations resulting in greater business resiliency and the agility to take advantage of unforeseen disruptions.

Keep safe. All of us at Aras wish you a prosperous 2022.

2021 in Review

Mark Reisig — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 15:08:00 GMT

As we head into the new year with the pace of change continuing, digital transformations accelerating, and connectivity increasing, I’d like to take a few moments to reflect on our 2021 predictions.

Remote Work: Correct
Predicting that in 2021 the economy and our behaviors would adapt to a persistent pandemic was spot on. Many of us continued to work primarily from home with very little travel. Industries that were impacted due to social distancing, such as air travel, hospitality, and commercial real estate continued to suffer. Those businesses with a high amount of cost sunk into the post-pandemic economy were negatively impacted. Companies with a high amount of technical debt in legacy systems, and with a heavy reliance on onsite data centers were at a disadvantage when compared to more nimble competitors with SaaS cloud-based solutions, enabling their businesses to be more resilient and agile.

Digital Transformations Become More Focused: Correct
Prior to the pandemic in early 2020, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) had great expectations to digitally transform their companies. Then the pandemic disrupted everyone’s plans with forced transformations occurring in 2020 as we attempted to keep our employees safe, cut costs, work remotely, and refocus on only what mattered to keep the business healthy.

Companies entered 2021 investing in higher levels of digitalization with more focused incremental transformations and clearly defined achievable outcomes to enable greater collaboration and innovation across the product lifecycle. In order to be more competitive in a new, more digital economy, companies are accelerating their investments in product innovation platforms, digitalization and digital transformations. “Global spending on the digital transformation (DX) of business practices, products, and organizations is forecast to reach $2.8 trillion in 2025, more than double the amount allocated in 2020. According to a new update to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide, DX spending will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4% over the 2021-2025 forecast period as organizations pursue a holistic digital strategy for people, processes, technology, data, and governance.

The Emergence of Digital Threads: Correct
The foundation of business resiliency is the digital thread connecting your data across applications and domains throughout the engineering, manufacturing, and service processes of the product lifecycle. This provides traceability of an asset throughout its lifecycle. Companies are increasingly focused on improving their digital thread, enabling improved collaboration and efficiency.

Cloud Platform Adoption Increases: Correct
The companies Aras deals with are deploying in the cloud with many choosing the Aras Enterprise SaaS solution. This is a powerful SaaS offering with unlimited customizations and upgrades including all customizations on the customer’s schedule.

“Based on our research and industrial consulting experience, CIMdata believes that the flexibility and scalability of cloud-delivered SaaS solutions can significantly help companies execute their digital transformation plan.” (CIMdata)

However, there is a caveat to this shift to a SaaS PLM offering. First, the obvious question: Does the SaaS offering contain all of the capabilities and all of the applications of the on-premise version (as many still do not)? Secondly, will your specific requirements be met by the SaaS PLM offering, which in some cases is a rigid out of the box (OOTB) offering?

Overall, 2021 marked a major shift for PLM in which many companies made or are in the process of making the move to the cloud, and in particular to SaaS PLM.

Greater Resiliency in Manufacturing: Correct
Manufacturing companies once primarily targeted their processes to produce product for the least cost. This resulted in the 1970’s trend known as “globalization,” or the offshoring of manufacturing. It is based on profit and gave rise to many economies around the world, such as China. The idea was that manufacturing without labor and environmental regulations could overcome the cost of shipping the finished product.

However, the combination of increasing trade wars, tariffs, and finally the pandemic has given rise to companies beginning to re-shore or near-shore some of their critical manufacturing facilities and focus on more automation and just-in-time manufacturing methods.

While some organizations may take this approach, the pandemic won’t stop the world from becoming more connected. While companies will alter their supply chains, the major focus of which will be reducing single points of failure, and instead invest in flexibility and resiliency in their manufacturing operations and in the digital threads that connect them.

Smart manufacturing isn’t about the rigid automation of one thing for decades to come, but instead about how fast you can adapt to manufacture something you didn’t manufacture previously. During COVID-19, companies have had to come up with ways to more safely manufacture their products. In the future, it’s clear this is going to continue to shift toward managing production floors remotely.

PLM Becomes Core to Digital Transformations: Correct
For years, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software was focused on product development within engineering, but not the entire product lifecycle. A PLM system is not a software technology. You can’t buy it from a vendor. It’s a strategic business approach that may be made up of a portfolio of software products or applications based on a platform like Aras. Companies have begun transforming their product ecosystems (PLM systems) into more flexible end-to-end processes—a web of digital threads that enable greater collaboration across the lifecycle, the supply chain, and with their customers and assets.

Digital Twins: Partial
Historically, the issue with the adoption of digital twins has been that a ‘performance digital twin’ was not tied to an up-to-date configured digital twin with accurate as-maintained data and parameters, along with a digital thread across the product lifecycle to provide useful insights. It’s previously been focused on Internet of Things (IoT) performance data disconnected from “configured” digital twins. Aras has released Digital Twin Core, which manages configured digital twin physical assets, along with Dynamic Product Navigation, a platform service that enables you to visually render your product based on PLM data—regardless of your many originating CAD models from various vendors. This allows service technicians and those in any other discipline to view their product in terms they understand, and to collaborate in context with other domains anywhere in the lifecycle across a visual digital thread. Many companies made considerable investments in digital twins and as-running operations last year.

We rated this item as “partial” because while many companies are aggressively pursuing digital twins of their physical assets, their lack of a digital thread is holding them back. The technology is here. What has been underestimated is an organization’s ability to use a digital thread across their enterprise to manage their assets, which will be key in 2022.

The primary goal of most businesses should be to make focused investments to enable greater resiliency—to be ready to pivot, to react to unforeseen change, and to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. PLM had a banner year in 2021 and despite the pandemic we are optimistic about what the new year will bring.

Happy 2022!

2021 in Review

Mark Reisig — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 14:00:00 GMT

Digital Transformation Forever

Mark Reisig — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Historically, companies have used digital transformation initiatives to change their business model to better meet the demands of their customers and achieve cost efficiency. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not uncommon to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on digital transformation initiatives that resulted in a high percentage of well-documented failures.

I recently came across an interesting blog titled, The Top 10 Digital Transformation Failures of All Time, Selected by an ERP Expert Witness, and was particularly disturbed by the Haribo gummy bear failure. This blog is of course slanted toward a particular technology, ERP, but there are similar characteristics with digital transformation initiatives and major digitalization efforts that involve PLM. The larger issue at hand is that digital transformations themselves are transforming in a rapidly and ever-changing world.

The failures outlined in the blog mentioned above have a common theme—they are single initiatives. What’s missing is the fact that, as an outcome of the pandemic, companies must continuously change to make their business more resilient and agile. All businesses continuously transform in a good or bad way, whether they intend to or not, until they no longer exist. When you have a budget tied up in maintaining legacy IT infrastructure that can’t adapt to change, you are essentially waiting to get disrupted, and that’s no longer an option if you want to remain relevant and competitive.

The shift that is taking place is to more continuous, incremental transformations. One huge benefit to continuous transformation is that it reduces operational disruption, which is the largest risk for any digital transformation effort. There is nothing wrong with incremental change. Incremental change lowers the risk of failure by demonstrating a better Return on Investment (ROI) and Time to Value (TTV). Additionally, smaller, more frequent successes convince people to adopt and contribute to a culture of continuous change.

The pandemic turned transformational efforts away from large, 100 million dollar+ transformations and opened the door for the ability to execute many digitalization efforts and digital transformations focused on making companies more collaborative, agile, and resilient, while using less people and less budget.

Specifically, the pandemic forced a shift from in-person collaboration to digital collaboration. This could be related to any number of factors impacting your business, such as growing complexity of products, a remote and global workforce, supply chain flexibility, improved quality, better reuse of design data, digital threads, digital twins, a move to the cloud, a shift to products-as-a-service, more pervasive change management, regulatory compliance, better security, and improved time-to-market. Regardless of which areas you choose to improve, you will need to improve how you communicate across your product ecosystem for it to be successful.

In IDC’s Product and Innovation Survey 2021[1] , 800 manufacturing executives were asked, “When they do collaborate, how do engineering, manufacturing, and service collaborate?” The top response, which over 50% of respondents chose, was through a digital collaboration platform (i.e., Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google). This was not surprising to me. The second most popular response, with just under 50%, was a PLM system.

While it’s true we’re experiencing a resurgence in PLM, it can’t be your grand pappy’s PLM system. Rigid and inflexible PLM software won’t cut it moving forward. You can no longer spend millions to customize it, only to get stuck on an unsustainable release. You can’t expect those same unappreciative engineers to use older technology without secure in-context collaboration with manufacturing and service. The future demands that PLM be built on a resilient platform, or as Gartner, IDC, and CIMdata have defined it - a Product Innovation Platform. A Product Innovation Platform offers the ability to configure, customize, and build applications the PLM provider doesn’t have – all while staying upgraded.

Let me be clear, this is not an Out-of-the Box (OOTB) solution. Customizations are not riskier or more costly if the platform provides guaranteed upgrades, which are in fact the greatest means to adapt and optimize your PLM system. I interviewed Tech-Clarity’s James White, and in a recent webinar and eBook, he made the point that OOTB is a fallacy and most companies prioritize PLM functionality and the “what’s right for me” experience.

A successful Product Innovation Platform is not a portfolio of products without an end-to-end digital thread. It’s also not one without digital twins—an accurate, up-to-date replica of your assets in the field. It is one that enables you to collaborate across your enterprise with different types of data. It enables you to customize PLM applications, build industrial grade applications on the platform, and run it securely with performance and scalability from the cloud. Furthermore, it should provide you with the option to have it hosted as a SaaS offering – with upgrades, including customizations, on your schedule.

Industry ecosystems are now the top focus for manufacturers. This is causing companies to move toward PLM providers who offer a digital transformation platform that increases flexibility and resiliency across the enterprise. Companies today must have the ability to increase their capability, knowledge, and collaboration so they can adapt and execute most efficiently, regardless of the future disruptions they may face.

[1] IDC, Product and Service Innovation Survey Report, Doc # US46592621, July 2021

Digital Transformation Forever

Mark Reisig — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 14:30:00 GMT

[1] IDC, Product and Service Innovation Survey Report, Doc # US46592621, July 2021

Digital Transformation Forever

Mark Reisig — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 14:30:00 GMT

[1] IDC, Product and Service Innovation Survey Report, Doc # US46592621, July 2021

Digital Transformation: Break on Through to the Other Side

Mark Reisig — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 15:00:00 GMT

You might have heard the song, or perhaps just know the title, Break On Through (To the Other Side), performed by The Doors in the late 60’s with lyrics by the late Jim Morrison. The song’s title and lyrics reminded me that we’re living in times of great change and disruption and that breaking through barriers that have been constructed to keep us from greater knowledge is a problem we see in many organizations. Today, all companies are attempting to transform from their growingly chaotic past to breaking through to the other side—one in which they can keep pace and continuously adapt with greater agility.

Every company is being impacted by ubiquitous change—the need to adapt due to new market realities and disruptions, the need to innovate with speed and keep pace with the confluence of emerging technologies, and the need to transform their products as well as their businesses models to provide the value that their future customers will demand.

Change is Accelerating

The major trend we must face in an uncertain world, is that change is only going to accelerate. You cannot run—you cannot hide. The fact is that changes in technology are occurring beyond our ability to anticipate them. We often overlook this fact, assuming that what we’ll buy today will meet our needs tomorrow. When it comes to PLM systems, this has clearly proven not to be true. And it’s not just technology and connectivity, but the many different types of data now used in our products (i.e., model-based system engineering (MBSE), simulations, software, electronics, electro-mechanical, etc.), which need to be viewed and collaborated on by more diverse and distributed groups, enabling us to share more knowledge and innovate at continually accelerating rates.

Adapting to New Market Realities

There is one major differentiator between companies that succeed in the long term and those that get disrupted—business resiliency. If you’re digitally transforming or working on a large digitalization effort, the one question you should be asking yourself is, how can we cultivate greater business resiliency? The ability to adapt during uncertain times, such as the pandemic, is what separates those that thrive from those that get disrupted.

Confluence of Emerging Technologies

The pace at which technologies are emerging and compounding on one another has caused a shift in how companies think about technology. You can no longer allow specific domains to budget and acquire best-of-breed technologies, hoping that your IT group can keep them integrated with other similarly acquired “one-off” procurements, and then magically expect a digital thread to bridge this myriad of one-off procurements with no thought as to how these isolated technologies will result in a traceable digital thread.

Many companies have already weighed themselves down with a tremendous amount of technical debt maintaining these isolated, and often obsolete, technologies when what they need to do is strategically use technology that enables their enterprise to share and collaborate across domains.

The spend on technology must use the ability to leverage technology (typically a platform at the core) to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer engagement and, most importantly, enable collaboration. Ultimately, this will result in a more adaptive organization that is more innovative in terms of the products it produces while also encouraging new business models (i.e., digital thread, digital twin, etc.).

You can no longer afford to get stuck on obsolete PLM software—typically a portfolio of products built on different technology stacks. These are mine fields for digital transformation initiatives. The backbone of your product ecosystem should be a platform with an inherent digital thread that can be customized and upgraded as quickly as possible, with the ability to build applications and connect to other applications, giving you the openness, flexibility, and scalability to allow your company to take advantage of emerging technologies and adapt quickly as required, without being dependent on the software vendor for some future capability you couldn’t have foreseen months before. The fact is, you absolutely cannot continue to endure long and expensive upgrades. For more on the impact of PLM upgrades the different PLM vendors, see the CIMdata Upgrade Study.

Going beyond the boundaries of traditional PLM, Aras provides a platform that enables organizations to configure and customize any application built on it. Aras provides all Aras PLM applications as part of the subscription. Aras’ customers can also build applications on top of the platform to fill any gaps, as required, and can connect them to other applications, so you’re never dependent solely on the software vendor. The platform enables companies to extend the digital thread across the enterprise, giving customers bi-directional traceability and the ability to share data securely, in context, with more users and a much higher percentage of users not in engineering. All of this, upgraded by Aras as part of the subscription and guaranteed, which is unique in the industry. The reason Aras can do this is because of the architecture and the low-code data modeling of the Aras platform.

Transformation of Products and Business Models

You can no longer engineer a product and organize and operate a company the way you did twenty years ago and provide the experience customers will value. Today, you must deliver differentiation in ways that your competitors can’t provide. This has caused many businesses to actually question what business they’re in. The market is littered with “Blockbusters” waiting to happen. Take the automotive industry as an example. Let’s say a company makes parts for engines, once a thriving business, but electronic vehicles don’t even use internal combustion engines.

Or take a look at ridesharing. Recent ridesharing market analysis illustrates the market is expected to increase by a 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between late 2019 and 2025. At this rate, the market will increase from $61 billion to $220 billion in those 5½ years—an increase of nearly 400%. These stats reveal the projected success of established ride-sharing companies globally as well as the financial potential of upcoming startup companies. As an example, Uber and Lyft are responsible for up to 14% of vehicle miles traveled in some more populated US states.

If we look more closely at products, we see a huge shift in mechanical functions becoming software functions. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this shift, Toyota Motor Corp. will increase its software engineer intake to around 40% to 50% of all technical hires in spring 2022 as it looks to supercharge the development of autonomous and other next-generation vehicles.

The even bigger issue is the need for many more disciplines to collaborate across other disciplines that use domain specific data sets in order to coordinate and optimize more complex designs.

Additionally, to handle the increased complexity of products throughout the lifecycle, companies are using cross discipline configuration management and variant management in combination with building their products based on platforms. This is very similar to how Aras’ platform architecture works—enabling greater personalization, reducing time-to-market and providing the ability to upgrade more efficiently.

Today's consumer is accustomed to paying for services they use and, in many industries, companies are shifting to “product-as-a-service” and “power by the hour” subscription models, while others are offering more personalization in their configure-to-order and engineered-to-order offerings. As a result, companies are designing new platform-based product designs to enable more sustainable personalization. Again, not all that different from what Aras offers. We no longer manufacture, ship and forget. If we want to keep the customer, it is necessary for engineering, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance work more closely together.

This is causing more companies to deploy configured digital twins, exact replicas of the physical asset in the field, not just to improve their margins in operations, service, and maintenance, but also to gain useful insights to enable them to deliver more innovative upgrades and new offerings. The ability to use this data to provide more value and a better experience to your customer is paramount.

But, a digital twin is an orphan without a digital thread that connects data, teams and, applications across the product lifecycle. This enables more people to share knowledge, gained in the later stages of the product lifecycle, with designers for better product enhancements and next generation offerings.

The digital thread can also enable a multitude of smaller closed loops, connecting internal organizations more closely and with greater impact. The digital thread, inherent in the Aras platform bridges many gaps, allowing organizations to “break on through to the other side” where they can provide a continually improving customer experience.

The pandemic forced almost every company to quickly move to remote work and, in many cases, highlighted their lack of digital readiness, whether that be security, supply chains, digital twins, digital threads, moving to a platform in the cloud, etc. It has brought about a change in mindset—moving from cost reduction as a primary driver of digital transformation, to focusing on investing in platforms and digital transformations to gain a competitive advantage with a greater degree of business resiliency. Clearly, the ability to adapt to the unknown and to do so as change accelerates significantly impacts how we work and live.

If you’re considering a way to differentiate yourselves from your competitors, please check out www.Aras.com.

PLM: The New Digital Transformation Platform

Mark Reisig — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Manufacturers will never return to how they operated in a pre-pandemic world. The pandemic itself is not the sole reason companies are now intensifying their focus to digitally transform, but it did expose many vulnerabilities that triggered the way they think about how they’ll design, make, service, and sell their products and services moving forward.

During the pandemic, 97% percent of businesses experienced disruptions to their digital transformation (DX) projects. Decision makers do not believe these disruptions will end as the pandemic does—with 76% of global businesses expecting further business impacts. The pace of change, the amount of data, and the convergence of emerging technologies and disruptions are only accelerating. Additionally, companies are increasingly saddled with growing legacy infrastructures and technologies, which are the major causes for digital transformation failures.

My belief is that we’ve reached an inflection point where companies can no longer rely on obsolete PLM software that, in many cases, not only doesn’t encourage digital transformation, but is the very bottleneck preventing it. Instead, organizations need a digital transformation platform to continually improve the way they use data to dramatically improve the efficiency of their end-to-end business processes in order to improve the experiences of their employees, customers, and partners.

In a world becoming more disruptive with increasing complexity of products, services, and changing business models, 95% of companies believe digitally transforming is still the key to their future success. Companies are shifting their strategic priorities to include continuous transformation of their product ecosystem to eliminate duplicative work, achieve greater resiliency and agility, and achieve faster, more cost-effective, sustainable innovation. Doing so on the wrong software has been a serious problem in many failed digital transformations.

Traditional PLM

Many in the pre-pandemic world viewed PLM as an engineering tool—something that managed their parts, BOMs, and change management. Of course, that was where it all began. Now the challenge we face is that companies need PLM software to be able to incorporate the whole product eco-system, the design intent, a growing digital thread, and the ability to collaborate across the entire value chain. It needs to enable companies to adapt and digitally transform.

The primary challenge PLM software vendors are facing is they’re not resilient—not able to keep their customers current. This is compounded by the fact that many companies—through acquisition and reorganization—have several PLM systems integrated with many ERP systems, typically using several intelligent numbering systems. If this sounds all too familiar, you likely have a gaping hole in your DX strategy.

Executives are frequently unaware of the dependency of DX on PLM platforms. What is often misunderstood is that a true DX platform is an extension of the company that’s using it. In the past, digital transformation initiatives were more outside-in transformations, where top-down leadership mandated a digital strategy using an assortment of industry 4.0 technologies—shiny objects, which invariably failed or achieved less than profitable results because it underestimated the acceleration of data, the rigidness of the legacy systems, and the need to empower the workforce to adapt from within.

Add to this, over the past decade, in response to the growing complexity of products being designed, manufactured, and serviced, PLM vendors went on a buying spree and then tried to address the needs of their customers with many products on the multiple technology stacks now in their “portfolio” of solutions. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help the companies drowning in their own technical debt. By selling additional add-on modules, the PLM software vendors were causing their customers complexity to increase, causing them to be less efficient and more rigid at a time where the opposite is required—a DX platform that would result in low-risk transformations and thus greater sustainability and business resiliency.

It’s now abundantly clear that companies need a platform approach—a real platform, not a portfolio of tools that you have to cobble together. A platform that expands your digital thread far beyond traditional PLM. One that enables the entire value chain to collaborate, innovate, and use data that they’ve historically never had access to.

PLM Platform Checklist

When looking at any PLM platform, everyone should be asking themselves some basic questions:

How does this make us more resilient, more agile, more current?
Can I easily configure and customize in a sustainable way and still upgrade every year?
Is it completely open so you can federate or connect quickly and easily?
Will this increase the robustness of our digital thread?
Will this enable greater collaboration across the enterprise?
Will this reduce our dependency on legacy tools?
Does this run on a cloud-first containerized technology (public, private) on-premises and do they offer a SaaS solution with the same exact functionality?
Is it an actual platform (not a “portfolio” of technologies)?
Will this enable us to continually transform?

Current DX are different in the sense that, by necessity, they have to move much faster and be even more connected, more scalable, more sustainable, less risky, and able to adapt as the company evolves.

PLM Platform

A PLM platform has taken on a whole new meaning—a real low-code platform, where the PLM applications are developed using the same platform services. The applications can be developed by the PLM vendor, third parties, or the customer. Regardless of who does it, everything needs to remain current in order to keep pace with your vision.

Aras Innovator is both a highly configurable end-to-end enterprise PLM solution, which includes applications for engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance for the world’s most complex system intensive companies, while also being a resilient low-code platform. Why is that important? Many PLM vendors misuse the term “platform” rather than “portfolio” or “collection of products.” In the case of Aras, you can bring up any platform service in any application. You can configure or customize anything or build applications from scratch and Aras guarantees the upgrade, which Aras performs. This is critical to connecting all items used across the digital thread and connecting to applications outside the Aras Platform, such as a CRM or ERP. This enables companies to not only be more efficient across their product lifecycle, but they can also digitally transform on the platform, sunsetting legacy technologies and incorporating more people and applications, thus reducing their technical debt and increasing their ability to collaborate and transform.

“By taking a sustainable platform approach, organizations are enabling the enterprise to get their work done in the most efficient way possible and can ensure end-to-end optimization and connectivity that is critical to an organization’s digital thread.” – CIMdata

Current

The platform you transform on must remain current in order to take advantage of the latest capabilities. This is the single most important factor in today’s accelerating world. Your platform must be current. This is what enables you to add new functionality and value, connecting your people with the data they need to see and collaborate with. The obvious advantage to upgrading every year is productivity, which will vary from company to company, but your collaborative productivity, ability to make data-driven decisions, improve your cost of quality, decrease your time to market, and adapt to unforeseen disruptions and opportunities will give you a tremendous competitive advantage.

It is literally impossible to compete if you cannot keep your digital transformation platform current.

“Customers of the Aras PLM platform stated that they are able to upgrade significantly faster, easier and at less costs than customers of competitive products.” – CIMdata

If you are interested in how current companies using leading PLM vendor software are, I recommend the CIMdata Upgrade study, where customers using Aras’ competitors average upgrading every 8-12 years at significant costs and time.

Openness

I cannot understate the importance of your ability to own all your own data. To an executive, this sounds straightforward—everyone owns their data. If that were true, which it is absolutely not, you could easily move the data from one system to another with ease. Companies that have tried to transform, move off legacy platforms to the cloud or, in some vendors’ cases, tried to upgrade, found themselves unable to successfully and cost effectively move data. Your people and your data are your most important assets—make sure you own and control your own data. The Aras platform has open APIs, nothing obfuscated in the database, our roadmap is public and is the same one development uses.

Digital Thread

Your digital thread enables you to graphically traverse an item bi-directionally across its lifecycle and show all related items. Aras allows users to graphically navigate their digital thread, providing efficiency and collaboration across the enterprise where, a few years ago, none existed. This is what enables a DX platform to cut across organizational silos and enable a different mindset. Knowledge elevates us all to understand each other, work better as a team, innovate more effectively, and become adaptable. Quite simply, it enables a data-driven world rather than a legacy process-driven world, and it will cause organizational change to follow.

Reducing Technical Debt

The biggest obstacle to DX is your legacy infrastructure. Those best of breed applications that were customized and got stuck, or home-grown workarounds, let you get work done in a silo, but they are major bottlenecks in terms of digitally transforming to enable your people to collaborate. For those of you that think your culture is a bigger challenge, try using archaic tools that don’t allow your people to find the data they need to get their jobs done more efficiently and collaborate in context with those they don’t yet work with because their data is stuck in separate silos. When knowledge is shared, people collaborate, and efficient teams are created. A DX platform with the low-code ability to create industrial applications to replace legacy infrastructure goes directly to reducing your legacy costs and makes everyone involved more efficient, happier, and empowered.

Future-Proof

The pandemic hit home the need for businesses to be more resilient. According to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index 2020, which surveyed over 4000 business leaders globally, 89% said the pandemic highlighted the need for a more agile and scalable IT environment.

This is where traditional PLM fell flat on its face. To be agile, the single most important requirement of a PLM platform is a resilient architecture that can meet future unknown needs. If you’re buying to solve certain business obstacles, or because this is your CAD vendor, and you ignore how to keep your PLM platform current, flexible and upgradeable, you’re not only leaving your company open to disruption—your PLM system itself may end up being one of the bottlenecks it should be replacing.

Cloud-First

Why isn’t your PLM system native in the cloud? There are a whole host of excuses, but the simple fact is that on-premises highly customized PLM solutions have traditionally not had the same capability as a cloud native solution. If the PLM vendor has a subset of capabilities or is going to force you to take upgrades without unlimited customizations, you simply can’t move to the cloud with any level of sophistication. This is why PLM has traditionally been such a laggard in terms of moving to the cloud.

Aras Innovator is containerized and can run in a public or private cloud or in Aras’ Enterprise SaaS offering, including DevOps, with sustainable unlimited customization, while using the same exact code and customizations that are used with the on-premises version of Aras Innovator.

Conclusion

PLM is becoming the new digital transformation platform, which is an extension of your company. Those that understand this will lead and achieve better bottom-line profits and top-line revenues. You will continuously transform your product ecosystem, expand your digital thread, empower your people, and create a more resilient and agile business.

“Companies pursuing a digital transformation should include Aras on their short list of solutions to investigate” – CIMdata

PLM: The New Digital Transformation Platform

Mark Reisig — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 15:00:00 GMT

How does this make us more resilient, more agile, more current?
Can I easily configure and customize in a sustainable way and still upgrade every year?
Is it completely open so you can federate or connect quickly and easily?
Will this increase the robustness of our digital thread?
Will this enable greater collaboration across the enterprise?
Will this reduce our dependency on legacy tools?
Does this run on a cloud-first containerized technology (public, private) on-premises and do they offer a SaaS solution with the same exact functionality?
Is it an actual platform (not a “portfolio” of technologies)?
Will this enable us to continually transform?

Empowering Your Digital Transformation

Mark Reisig — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Digital Transformation (DX) is often described in terms of changing processes and incorporating emerging innovative technologies—with hopefully at least some lip service paid to the people bringing it all to fruition. Certainly, successful digital transformations require investments in technologies and processes that drive business value, but the core of any DX initiative is, ultimately, the hearts and minds behind it—your people.

People are unique. We’re likely the most adaptive species there is, with our progenitors managing to adapt to extreme climate shifts while dispersing all around the globe. So really, it’s common sense that an undertaking to adapt to an increasingly digital world should focus on the most adaptable pieces. Technology and its tools enable transformation initiatives that foster and empower ingenuity, allowing people to innovate and meet challenges with more resiliency.

The major driver compelling organizations to digitally transform is the rapid acceleration of data, connections, and disruptions. And this acceleration shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. It’s now impossible to digitally transform solely top-down, so a more horizontal approach is needed.

Employees need to know why

As employee engagement is integral to your transformation, one of, if not the, strongest ways to loop your people in is by explaining and agreeing on the strategy. Outlining your business’ strategy by explicitly framing goals and priorities is surely essential, but that’s only half of the equation. There must be a communicated purpose behind it that reaches all levels. It’s critical that everyone is able to articulate why, as a company, you are transforming your processes.

This is the only way successful organizations break through the vertical silos. Rather than hoping the message trickles down the management chain, there must be an effort to see that each leader’s goals are aligned with the company’s transformational goals. Doing so will help ensure that all employees can comfortably align with and participate in achieving these goals.
This sounds clear-cut—everyone knowing “why” is good—like a sports team all being on the same page of the game plan. It also means business is moving faster, with no time-outs needed for the coach to lecture the players—they are already in sync.

Culture of collaboration

Your team and team of teams need to be empowered to innovate within a culture that can change with them. This will require moving away from steadfast top-down verticality to horizontal network organizations where people at all levels are inspired to make transformative decisions rather than simply following along with business-as-usual.

Going back to sports for a moment, it’s good for players to have their roles to operate in as well as preset plays to react with—but it’s even better if they also have permission to experiment should they need to. They can react faster with solutions tailored to their situation, and this establishes more confidence in the team’s ability to collaborate in these moments, too.
Agility, flexibility, and a readiness to pivot are by-products of people who feel free to move, unrestricted by bureaucratic red tape and paralyzing fears of risk. Break people out of their shells—or functional silos—by organizing teams to promote and elevate cross-functional collaboration.

Think incrementally

Evolution is not a process of leaps and bounds–it’s iterative. The word “transformation” speaks to a radical, dramatic change, and certainly, this is the end-goal of DX—an overhaul of your processes—but that doesn’t have to happen overnight. Nor must said processes be reinvented from the ground up. You’re looking for inefficiencies that are outdated and clunky. You’re looking to continually transform your business with platform technology at the core, which enables people to streamline processes and maximize their use of data and disrupt your own business.

Fixing your biggest obstacles and underlying data and processes incrementally is quite achievable. Additionally, a sustainable digital transformation should be able to handle the setbacks and small failures in an ongoing DX journey—because the steps forward are measured so that tripping up isn’t catastrophic. This way, progress is gradual but consistent.

Digital Thread, Resilient Platform

The right tools in the right hands make all the difference. Digital transformation is really about adapting to a rapidly changing digital landscape, therefore, you need to be as open, flexible, and agile as possible. The applications and processes should be built using your digital thread on a platform that can increase your business resiliency.

In the case of Aras, this is achieved with a resilient platform with customizable PLM applications built on an open, industrial, low-code platform. On top of all that, Aras provides subscribers with lifetime upgrades, so you stay current and are able transform when needed, especially incrementally.

Out-of-the-box (OOTB): A Legacy Concept

Mark Reisig — Tue, 25 May 2021 17:00:00 GMT

At times, an executive considering major software purchases will mandate buying out-of-the box (OOTB) software, believing it a best practice. They think it will reduce their costs and the mounting number of obsolete technologies that consume their enterprise landscape. This, of course, sounds good, but it’s based on false assumptions and outdated thinking.

“Traditional build-vs.-buy thinking underestimates the complexity and cost of packaged solutions as well as the value of platforms and their ecosystems. And it overestimates the cost and complexity of modern custom development as well as the similarities between firms in a truly adaptive digital environment. In the digital era, software is an expression of the business. Firms can’t buy this; they must create it using a blend of customization and composition.” (Forget About Build Versus Buy; Your Choice is Customize Or Compose, Joe Cicman, John Bratincevic, and John Rymer, April, 2021)

The OOTB Pitch

The problem with OOTB software is that it lives in the past and can’t anticipate the future. The logic an OOTB software vendor uses is that they have digital technologies for your real-world business challenges and it will cost less. That’s blatantly incorrect. When a vendor like Aras provides free upgrades, including all of your customizations, the deployment, the upgrade process, and the overall operational efficiency of an enterprise is significantly improved along with a total cost of ownership that should be approximately 30% less.

If an OOTB software vendor has everything you need to currently operate your unique processes, that’s great—but you’re still left with the limitation cause by the fact that you and your software vendor cannot anticipate everything the future might have in store. Even if you continually sub-optimize your processes to meet the vendor’s limitations, you’ll run into other best-of-breed applications that require you to stitch multiple products together, resulting in a very rigid product ecosystem and a broken or inefficient digital thread. And finally, when you look for examples of where this is working, you won’t find any—there are no successful OOTB deployments in large, complex companies.

Velocity of Change

Just think of the acceleration of the amount of product data and velocity of emerging smart, connected technologies, and understand it’s only getting exponentially faster. It is paradoxical to try and circumvent the costs of legacy technology by going OOTB, when you will inevitably need to customize it, thereby creating a system that can’t be properly upgraded, resulting in more legacy.

Every Company is Unique

OOTB underestimates your uniqueness, like using a one-size-fits-all pair of pants for people of drastically differing sizes. Companies manufacture and deliver complex products and services with variable amounts of software applications, coupled with users working in different roles and disciplines who deal with changing processes and other transforming technologies and data models. Your people and your corporate processes will not all fit into one static OOTB PLM software. Every company is an extension of the PLM platform they use—it impacts how their own people collaborate. When used correctly, the platform connects their products in the field with the rest of the enterprise (Digital Twin), thus creating better and more profitable user experiences.

Instant Legacy

With OOTB, invariably what happens is that a company will start out with the best of intentions but then is forced to customize PLM software that is only designed to work OOTB, creating what I call “Instant Legacy.” Once you’ve done this, it becomes so costly to maintain and upgrade that, ultimately, it’s simply too much.

CIMdata Upgrade Research Study

There are now proof points that demonstrate what happens when you focus on features and functions as opposed to an open, flexible, and upgradable platform. This is what has happened in the PLM Industry. According to a study conducted by CIMdata, “Dassault Systemes’ and PTC respondents averaged more than eight years between upgrades, and Siemens’ respondents were just over twelve years.” Customers have to pay for these upgrades too. “The average costs for respondents from Dassault Systems, PTC, and Siemens were just under $1M, just over $700K, and just over $1.2M respectively,” and the time it takes you to upgrade these vendors’ PLM software is 11 to 14 months.

The reason for this inability to customize and upgrade are purchasing decisions that prioritized features and functions based on the present, versus ensuring an ability to sustainably customize and compose for the future. This type of thinking seriously underestimates the acceleration of data and the ubiquitous nature of emerging technologies, along with the impact it has on changing business models.

In the case of Aras, where the cost of upgrades is included in the subscription, Aras is both an enterprise PLM software and a low-code platform, allowing companies to make massive customizations with Aras guaranteeing the upgrades. According to CIMdata, the organization using Aras to upgrade averaged less than $50K in cost and three months in time for us to complete. If you consider that Aras encourages people to configure and customize, the conventional wisdom would be that costs would go up, but it’s just the opposite. In their study, CIMdata finds that Aras’ customers perform major upgrades every 1.5 years compared to 8 to 12 years with our competitors. This is because Aras is a resilient platform designed from its inception to be customized and upgraded—open and accessible. Additionally, the Aras business model is designed to be more focused on our customers’ success and expansion. Ask yourself: why is Aras the only vendor that encourages customers to both configure and customize, build applications from scratch, and is willing to take on the upgrades as part of the subscription? Aras is different. We’re designed to help our customers future-proof.

The Future Is Unknown

Even if OOTB can currently compensate for your processes and people, it won’t be able to do so for long. The reality is that OOTB cannot predict everything you’ll need in the future. The future is an unknown, so you need the ability to adapt with speed, resilience, and agility. Your destination is not yet defined; you can’t expect OOTB software to support all of the capabilities and processes you don’t yet know you need.

Customization will be required with whatever solution you choose. This necessitates the flexibility of a low-code platform and the ability to sustainably configure and compose. Likewise, it is crucial to be able to adapt at lightning speed, to keep pace with innovation and the ever-increasing acceleration of data.

Digitalization at scale requires a platform that allows you to build custom applications to replace legacy role-based applications to enable everyone to collaborate more effectively and to easily connect to many systems.

Instead of OOTB, the focus should be on a PLM platform that is open, flexible, scalable, and upgradable—a low-code platform that has a sustainable way to customize and compose, to build applications, change processes, and interfaces. The platform must have an inherent digital thread with the ability to expand far beyond engineering to include users across all disciplines, the product lifecycle, and extended value chain. It should also enable you to sunset legacy applications by incorporating them into a PLM platform, thus reducing your technical debt while expanding collaboration and innovation across your enterprise. Aras Innovator is a digital transformation platform, giving your company the ability to continually adapt to business challenges that are not yet known. It absolutely should be current, to take advantage of emerging technologies and new capabilities that are not yet in existence, to weaponize your data and make better data-driven decisions. By following this more sustainable path, you are future-proofing your business and, in the process, improving your bottom-line profits and top-line revenues..

CIMdata Upgrade Research Results -- Is Obsolete PLM Software Killing Your Business?

Mark Reisig — Wed, 05 May 2021 18:00:00 GMT

Yes, as the world becomes more digital, PLM obsolescence could be costing organizations hundreds of millions of dollars every year, impacting their top and bottom lines.

Takeaways

The Aras Platform upgrades more frequently, faster, at less cost, and can handle customizations much better.
- Average time between upgrades is 1.5 years for Aras versus 8.3 – 12.43 years for traditional vendors.
- Average cost for competitors is 16 times ($732K), 21 times ($987), and 27 times ($1.25M) higher than Aras.
- Aras take less time to upgrade—3 months, compared to 11, 13, and 14 months.
- Aras is less complicated to upgrade—39 of our competitors' companies rated their upgrades “very difficult” whereas none did so for Aras.
- Customizations inhibit our competitors' upgrades—59%, 75%, and 82% by competitors.
“Staying current on a modern, well architected solution is critical to addressing unforeseen requirements long into the future. This resiliency happens when the platform is architected for flexibility and is kept current.”
You cannot digitally transform with obsolete PLM software.
Obsolete PLM software costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

CIMdata Research Conclusion

CIMdata has published the results of their PLM Upgrade Research with a very clear-cut conclusion:

“The results of this research show that the Aras PLM platform is easier to keep current than its competitors. Aras users upgrade more often, over a shorter duration, and at less cost than their competitors. Customizations, a critical area inhibiting upgrades are a significantly smaller problem for Aras customers than for those of their competitors.”

To be future-ready, you cannot be stuck running legacy PLM software, which is the case for most of our major competitors as shown in the chart below.

By contrast, the reason Aras keeps our customers current is that Aras was architected, from its inception, with customization in mind, and this is why Aras performs our customers’ upgrades as part of the subscription. Unlike our competitors, Aras sells one thing—the Aras Platform, Aras Innovator—so our business model is significantly different and more equitable. We only succeed when our customers expand.

This began to disrupt the PLM market several years ago when Aras started winning over marquee customers from the other PLM competitors, a trend which continues today.

While I don’t think the results of the survey surprise many industry veterans, I do think the significant and negative impact of PLM obsolescence on business is not well understood by many business leaders. This is what I’ll focus on.

The Value Gap

Last week, I interviewed Peter Bilello, the President and CEO of CIMdata, in our thought leadership webinar on their CIMdata Upgrade Research. Peter re-introduced the Value Gap, shown below, which I’m sharing from the eBook.

In short, as technology (green) becomes more pervasive, a company’s vision of what they want to achieve will grow (blue). But companies that are “followers” are unable to take advantage of this because their PLM software is not current, thus creating a value gap where the “value potential” is not met. The “leaders,” on the other hand, are current and take advantage of their increased capabilities to come closer to their vision.

Source: https://www.cimdata.com/en/resources/complimentary-reports-research/white-papers - scroll down to 2013

I would add that when you’re operating at a higher level in any endeavor, your vision will continue to rise as you incrementally add more capability and value, and continually meet incremental goals that become more and more achievable. This creates momentum and increases innovation, allowing the business to realize even more of a return on their investment. While notionally correct, I think the value gap between leaders and followers is far more dramatic than depicted in the chart and with Aras technology and vision, would show incremental steps upward every year or with every upgrade.

Reasons for PLM Obsolescence

You’ve likely heard the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which, to be clear, is just an excuse. According to CIMdata, “A sustainable PLM solution is one that can meet current and future business requirements with an acceptable return on investment (ROI) via incremental enhancements and upgrades.” But as clearly shown in the research, many companies using our competitors' PLM software are not staying current. In my experience, there are five reasons PLM software is not upgraded:

Technically Impossible
Typically, after an arduous deployment and the necessary customization to meet the businesses current needs, the software is no longer capable of upgrading. As time goes on, this just get worse as architecture and schemas of the new versions change and you become stuck, unable to upgrade without a massive redeployment that includes expensive and time-consuming migration activities.

No ROI
If you take a year to upgrade and it costs close to a million dollars, the cost and impact to the business is so outrageous it can’t be justified. Now you have legacy which, in an earlier blog, I termed “Instant Legacy,“ typically with many integrations on your hands. This is a digital transformation killer and is the opposite of what PLM software is intended to do.

No Budget
Not having the budget is a real concern, but often the lack of budget is a mistake—a mis-prioritization of what’s important to your organization’s future growth, often combined with a high percentage of the overall budget being consumed by technical debt. A modern PLM platform, such as Aras, not only benefits your operational efficiency and provides your business with much needed resiliency, it can also reduce your technical debt by sunsetting legacy applications and incorporating them onto the platform, which we keep current. By reducing your legacy maintenance costs, this sustainable approach can save you millions to tens of millions and expands your digital thread across the enterprise—truly impacting your bottom-line.

We Spent a Gazillion Dollars and We’re Committed
The only thing worse than spending large amounts of money on the wrong thing is doubling down and spending more, expecting a better experience. The pandemic has accelerated the need to change, to expect transformation with less risk, less cost, and greater ROI that will lead to greater business resiliency. Throwing good money after bad is no longer being tolerated—there is more of a focus on the bottom-line and doing more with less. People that surround leaders of failed deployments or replace the person that was in charge are typically less committed to failing their business. As a society, we are becoming more connected, and in organizations, people expect that. We as consumers certainly do, so it’s no longer acceptable to stay stuck in the past.

When deciding to modernize PLM software, a process that often takes a year and costs around a million dollars, the cost benefit analysis is not likely to yield the ROI you’re looking for. A best practice is to do major upgrades every year, but if it takes you a year, you need to consider an alternative. If you’re not sure what to do, you can download Aras or run a small proof-of-concept (POC).

Leadership Doesn’t Understand Dependency of Digital Transformation on PLM
If your PLM system hasn’t been upgraded in years and isn’t the foundation for continuous digital transformation efforts, there is an absolute lack of understanding of how PLM can transform a business. CIMdata agrees, believing that “executive awareness of the dependency of digital transformation on PLM is lacking. This lack of understanding of its association to PLM-related investment and sustainability puts many digital transformation programs at risk of becoming yet another program of the month.”

However, in defense of leadership, if you keep going back to the well to ask for more money and can’t show continuous ROI, then it’s hard for any leader to invest and sponsor something that doesn’t impact their top and bottom-lines.

Regardless of the reasons why, you don’t stay current, the result is you’re clogging the arteries of your product ecosystem with disconnected obsolete technology that adds cost and becomes an impediment to any effort to adapt or transform your business.

Technical Debt

Large enterprises can spend as much as 80 percent of their IT budget on maintaining and operating legacy systems. And it’s not just the planned budget to maintain legacy, but also reacting when things go wrong, both adding IT cost and consuming your best IT resources. This directly impacts your bottom-line and is something that a current, resilient platform can reduce.

Cost of Keeping Your PLM Current

Per the CIMdata research, the costs to do an upgrade with our competitors averages between $732,000 and $1.25 million as shown in the chart below. That’s up to 27 times what it costs to do upgrades with Aras.

CIMdata’s research demonstrates that our competitors take between 11 to 14 months to execute as shown in their diagram below, which means you likely can’t justify keeping current because it takes so long to upgrade or re-deploy which, in my experience, is often the case.

This explains why, on average, our competitors are upgrading or redeploying every 8 to 12 years. There is simply no ROI that could justify this. The CIMdata survey goes on to show how customizations to our competitors inhibit their ability to upgrade.

If you can’t customize in order to optimize your processes and then regularly upgrade, there is no chance you’ll be able to adapt and compete with others who can.
And as bad as this seems, it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the negative impact of technological obsolescence on IT and even more so on the business.

Ongoing Maintenance Costs – Trickle Down Dependency

From an IT perspective, the cost of ongoing maintenance goes up and up and up due to not staying current. This is known as “trickle down dependency.” In addition to spending more time and money on responding to a growing majority of disgruntled users, you spend more on resolving internal issues because of integrations breaking and other changes impacting your “stuck in time” legacy PLM software. You end up becoming dependent on your PLM vendor to support the unsupported. Ultimately, the vendor no longer supports your release while other software, such as browsers, begin to fail. For extra money, the vendor will support your legacy habit. And what choice do you have at that point?

You do have a choice—and that is to get off that software as soon as possible and onto a more sustainable platform technology that will not only drastically reduce your IT costs, but also improve your business profits and revenues.

Productivity

Recently, I wrote a blog entitled, ”Which PLM Vendor Keeps You Most Current?,” that focused on the results of the CIMdata research that Peter Bilello presented on Tuesday. There, I posed the question, “What does outdated technology cost?” The average user, loses about 40 minutes of productivity a day, which translates to $3,930 annually. (Ladder.com) If I assumed, 5,000 users, that would be $19,65M per year. If you’re taking more than 7 years to upgrade to average, your users are wasting approximately $140M over that period. And that’s just their individual productivity due to not staying current.

Collaborative Productivity

When someone using legacy PLM tells me they have 5,000 users, I compare that to how many possible employees could use it and what they do. Usually, they’re in engineering, focused on design—either new product introduction or requisition to order or both, working with CAD, managing parts, BOMs, basic change management, and integration to some number of ERPs. Finally, I ask if the user count has gone up or down over a period of years. In my experience, legacy PLM users don’t expand based on need, and high concentrations of them are in engineering doing PDM, not PLM. In fact, oftentimes the legacy system is so hard to use, much of the work is done outside it.

This is important because the example I used above is a group of 5,000 users staying stagnant over time. I haven’t factored in the rest of the enterprise and any collaborative productivity or efficiencies they’re missing due to their inability to collaborate and/or expand the use of the PLM software across the lifecycle.

Within seven years, a typical Aras customer would expand its users approximately 50% to 400% from the original 5,000 users. That’s also with fewer people in given functions due to the enhanced productivity they get with new capabilities provided to them with each upgrade.

Why do Aras users expand? They expand due to the proliferation of data and connectivity that obsolete technology can’t take advantage of to the same degree. Aras’ customers expand first, because all of the applications are included in the platform subscription, along with any newly released applications, and all on an inherent digital thread. If you want to expand your deployment in quality or to expand into digital twins, they already have applications, that expands the collaboration to other groups.

Aras users also expand because they use the Aras low-code platform to quickly develop applications and role-based interfaces to expand usage and collaboration to users that were previously using other unsustainable tools or less productive workarounds. This enables more and more users to be connected to their digital thread, which keeps expanding across the enterprise, dramatically increasing collaborative productivity.

As an example, here are two slides from Insitu’s presentation at the ACE conference entitled “Insitu’s Agile Approach to Transforming their Engineering.” This demonstrates how customers expand the use of Aras applications and re-build legacy applications on the platform. You’ll notice they began in 2011, but moved to an Agile approach in 2017. In case you’re wondering, there were 7 upgrades after their initial deployment.

Going back to our previous example of 5,000 users with individual productivity of $20M per year (2 hours a week). According to Forrester, collaborative productivity increases that by 10% a week or 4 more hours a week—double.

At 5,000 users, Aras’ users overall productivity is $60M per year ($20M in Individual Productivity + $40M in Collaborative Productivity).

But over time, the number of users expands. So, if we conservatively say we’re only going to double the users over seven years, we would be talking $648M in productivity alone as shown in the chart below. This doesn’t even consider the reduction of technical debt and the flexibility to increase the percentage of your IT budget to fund more digital transformation and innovation initiatives.

Years	Users					Productivity
	5,000	6,000	7,500	9,000	10,000
Deployment
Year 1	$60M					$60M
Year 2		$72M				$72M
Year 3			$90M			$90M
Year 4			$90M			$90M
Year 5				$108M		$108M
Year 6				$108M		$108M
Year 7					$120M	$120M
Total						$648M

This also doesn’t factor in the cost of subscription, deployment, and additional customizations, but I may have underestimated the six hours of productivity gained by upgrading every year with Aras. That’s already a 15% productivity increase. “By using social technologies, companies can raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.”
(https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy)

Lost Opportunity Cost

This is the cost of a missed opportunity. What features does your business need that your legacy PLM software doesn’t provide? If you’re using legacy software, you’re missing many capabilities. One example might be: do you have digital twins in place—exact replicas of your assets in the field? Do you have the insights to make better data-driven decisions? Are you using this technology to build tighter relationships with customers—providing more value to them, and yourself, at less cost? Or is there a tremendous amount of swivel chair going on with little knowledge or ability to react to your customer’s needs?

According to CIMdata, a “US $20,000 investment has the opportunity to support US $200,000 in new revenue, a 10:1 return. The actual number may not be this large as there are many other costs and constraints, but the opportunity potential is still very large and when we perform ROI analyses, the returns are impressive, validating the opportunity cost premise proposed here.”

Every company needs to calculate their own ROI and consider the Time to Value (TTV). Even if the estimates of productivity for my hypothetical company are high, you’d likely consider many other factors, such as the difference in the cost of quality (COQ), direct material costs, direct component costs, reduction in scrap, significant reductions in rework, and potential softer cost avoidance, which are events that don’t occur because of intervention (usually impacting productivity), and which, having personally been involved in, makes me think the productivity numbers are understated. You’d also see major differences in data security and IP protection, the cost of regulatory compliance, and possibly damage to your brand and time-to-market and the likelihood you are losing customers.

Impacting Your Top and Bottom Lines

PLM obsolescence absolutely impacts your top and bottom-line. Here is a chart from an IDC Manufacturing Study in 2020 that shows the growing divide between non-digital manufacturers and digital manufacturers with similar results in the revenue profit index and the profit performance index. Those that stay current benefit considerably, while the divide is only going to widen.

IDC estimates the growth in manufacturing ops data will continue to explode over the next five years, ranging in industries from 154% (Light Industrial) to 469% (Semiconductor). Aerospace – 233%, Automotive OEM – 234%, Heavy Industry – 191% Medical Device – 234%. (Source: IDC, Operational Data: From Slideshow to Main Event, Doc # US45813220, Jan. 2020)

If your PLM software and your internal product ecosystem are not current, not resilient, and not functioning as a seamless digital thread that is expanding across your enterprise, enabling your value chain to collaborate and make better data-driven decisions, then I believe your lack of modernization will overwhelm you.

What Does Staying Current Look Like?

I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s presentation from our annual global ACE2021 Conference, “Aras Upgrades – A Customer’s Experience.” Microsoft went live in 2015. In each of the last five years, they upgraded five times as per the slide they presented below.

They’ve expanded the breadth of their deployment, now with 6,000+ internal users and 1,000 external users. They perform over 10,000 revisions a day and operate 24/7 on every continent. They have 25 integrations using many applications with many customizations and custom applications based on Aras Innovator’s low-code platform. According to Microsoft, their end users love the continual upgrades.

If you’re using a legacy PLM, is that what your users are saying? I could quote various statistics on retention of best employees based on using current technology versus legacy PLM software, but I think we all get the picture.

Now, hypothetically, let’s say we take that all away and go back to 2015 and give the users back the two legacy PLM systems they had, which had never been upgraded, and see what their experience would be like. If you’re on a legacy PLM system, watch that presentation and try to imagine them on an old, legacy PLM. That’s quite simply a major factor between success and failure.

Can You Digitally Transform on Legacy PLM?

There is no such thing as digitally transforming on legacy technology. In fact, your legacy PLM, which should be the catalyst technology, becomes one of the obstacles.
How important is you PLM platform to digitally transforming your business?

According to IDC, “Organizations continue to digitally transform, and industry ecosystems are a key investment; CEOs realize the importance of complementing data, applications, operations, and innovation initiatives for greater resiliency. 60% of CEOs surveyed in February 2021 cite industry ecosystems as a top priority or priority investment.” (Source: IDC, CEOs Prioritize Industry Ecosystems for 2021 and Beyond, DOC # US47499821, March 2021)

We’ll all look back on 2020-2021 and the pandemic as a time when we either seized the opportunity to transform or clung to our past. Economic adversity has always led to periods of business transformation and this time is no different. A current PLM platform that adapts as you require, and enables you to digitally transform to meet your current and future needs with a digital thread connecting your employees and stakeholders, is fundamental to being a leader.

CIMdata’s Upgrade Research concludes: “Companies pursuing a digital transformation should include Aras on their shortlist solutions to investigate.”

Does the Cloud Solve Your PLM Obsolescence Problem?

No, and Peter Bilello was very clear on that point in the webinar.

Moving to the cloud has many benefits, but it doesn’t solve the upgrade problem that the major PLM software vendors have to date. In fact, you could argue some have made it impossible.

First, just because a multi-tenant cloud pushes releases out, it doesn’t mean you have the unlimited customization most large complex customers require. And the software vendor pushing updates of any consequence on the customer can potentially wreak havoc with their existing capabilities and customizations.

Second, you can’t take a highly customized enterprise on-premise PLM system and move it to our competitors' cloud offerings if the functionality isn’t one-to-one.

These are the two primary issues that have slowed PLM adoption in the cloud. Aras has an alternative.

Aras Innovator is now containerized, meaning the platform with the same low-code platform services is available in the cloud in the Standard Edition (formerly called Premier), which companies can host in their own public or private cloud and, except for implementation, has the same functionality as they could deploy on-premise. And Aras offers an Enterprise SaaS, which hosts the same Aras Innovator Platform in the cloud with additional DevOps and Managed Services.

The two major differences between other cloud offerings and Aras’ are:

Unlimited customization, which no one else offers, and guaranteed upgrades.
One-to one compatibility as Aras Innovator platform services and applications are identical.

Agility Cost

This is the cost when you can’t adapt to meet changing business needs. Resiliency and agility are two of the most important characteristics in business. You could suffer everything I’ve described and more, redeploy and pay close to a million dollars and spend a year not transforming your company, or you could choose a flexible PLM platform where the upgrades are included in the subscription.

According to Rick Villars, Group Vice President of IDC, "The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/unforeseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy. A large percentage of a future enterprise's revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data resources." (Source: IDC, FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2021 Predictions, Doc # US46942020, October 2020)

Aras is changing the way people design, manufacture, and maintain products. Aras is a digital transformation platform—a resilient PLM with an inherent digital thread and a low-code platform that not only enables sustainable PLM, but also enables you to transform your business far beyond PLM.

Conclusion

Legacy systems don’t happen by accident, and a resolution won’t happen on its own until companies acknowledge the predicament they’re in. The CIMdata research clearly demonstrates that many companies are not in good shape—many are not current with the foundational software that should be driving increases in your profit margin and revenues. “To be successful, companies need to have the right tool and be up-to-date to take advantage of the latest capabilities.” (CIMdata)

The other week, I suggested you share the blog “Which PLM Vendor Keeps You Most Current?” with your leadership, and some did. With Aras, you can download Aras Innovator and try it out. We do no risk Proof-of-Concepts based on your criteria. If you choose not to go with Aras, you lose nothing. So, what do you have to lose?

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a wake-up call to consider a PLM platform that can meet both your current needs and your future ones as well—one that will stay current, increase your ability to adapt to the unforeseen, reduce your technical debt, expand your digital thread, drive greater business resiliency, and increase your agility. It starts by choosing technology that is open, flexible, scalable, and upgradeable—technology that can evolve with you and empower your people to continually drive digital transformations, increase collaboration, make better data-driven decisions, and out-innovate your competition—www.aras.com.

CIMdata Upgrade Research Results -- Is Obsolete PLM Software Killing Your Business?

Mark Reisig — Wed, 05 May 2021 18:00:00 GMT

Yes, as the world becomes more digital, PLM obsolescence could be costing organizations hundreds of millions of dollars every year, impacting their top and bottom lines.

Takeaways

The Aras Platform upgrades more frequently, faster, at less cost, and can handle customizations much better.
- Average time between upgrades is 1.5 years for Aras versus 8.3 – 12.43 years for traditional vendors.
- Average cost for competitors is 16 times ($732K), 21 times ($987), and 27 times ($1.25M) higher than Aras.
- Aras take less time to upgrade—3 months, compared to 11, 13, and 14 months.
- Aras is less complicated to upgrade—39 of our competitors' companies rated their upgrades “very difficult” whereas none did so for Aras.
- Customizations inhibit our competitors' upgrades—59%, 75%, and 82% by competitors.
“Staying current on a modern, well architected solution is critical to addressing unforeseen requirements long into the future. This resiliency happens when the platform is architected for flexibility and is kept current.”
You cannot digitally transform with obsolete PLM software.
Obsolete PLM software costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

To be future-ready, you cannot be stuck running legacy PLM software, which is the case for most of our major competitors as shown in the chart below.

This began to disrupt the PLM market several years ago when Aras started winning over marquee customers from the other PLM competitors, a trend which continues today.

Source: https://www.cimdata.com/en/resources/complimentary-reports-research/white-papers - scroll down to 2013

Cost of Keeping Your PLM Current

At 5,000 users, Aras’ users overall productivity is $60M per year ($20M in Individual Productivity + $40M in Collaborative Productivity).

Years	Users					Productivity
	5,000	6,000	7,500	9,000	10,000
Deployment
Year 1	$60M					$60M
Year 2		$72M				$72M
Year 3			$90M			$90M
Year 4			$90M			$90M
Year 5				$108M		$108M
Year 6				$108M		$108M
Year 7					$120M	$120M
Total						$648M

Unlimited customization, which no one else offers, and guaranteed upgrades.
One-to one compatibility as Aras Innovator platform services and applications are identical.

CIMdata Upgrade Research Results -- Is Obsolete PLM Software Killing Your Business?

Mark Reisig — Wed, 05 May 2021 14:20:00 GMT

Yes, as the world becomes more digital, PLM obsolescence could be costing organizations hundreds of millions of dollars every year, impacting their top and bottom lines.

Takeaways

The Aras Platform upgrades more frequently, faster, at less cost, and can handle customizations much better.
- Average time between upgrades is 1.5 years for Aras versus 8.3 – 12.43 years for traditional vendors.
- Average cost for competitors is 16 times ($732K), 21 times ($987), and 27 times ($1.25M) higher than Aras.
- Aras take less time to upgrade—3 months, compared to 11, 13, and 14 months.
- Aras is less complicated to upgrade—39 of our competitors' companies rated their upgrades “very difficult” whereas none did so for Aras.
- Customizations inhibit our competitors' upgrades—59%, 75%, and 82% by competitors.
“Staying current on a modern, well architected solution is critical to addressing unforeseen requirements long into the future. This resiliency happens when the platform is architected for flexibility and is kept current.”
You cannot digitally transform with obsolete PLM software.
Obsolete PLM software costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

To be future-ready, you cannot be stuck running legacy PLM software, which is the case for most of our major competitors as shown in the chart below.

This began to disrupt the PLM market several years ago when Aras started winning over marquee customers from the other PLM competitors, a trend which continues today.

Source: https://www.cimdata.com/en/resources/complimentary-reports-research/white-papers - scroll down to 2013

Cost of Keeping Your PLM Current

At 5,000 users, Aras’ users overall productivity is $60M per year ($20M in Individual Productivity + $40M in Collaborative Productivity).

Years	Users					Productivity
	5,000	6,000	7,500	9,000	10,000
Deployment
Year 1	$60M					$60M
Year 2		$72M				$72M
Year 3			$90M			$90M
Year 4			$90M			$90M
Year 5				$108M		$108M
Year 6				$108M		$108M
Year 7					$120M	$120M
Total						$648M

Unlimited customization, which no one else offers, and guaranteed upgrades.
One-to one compatibility as Aras Innovator platform services and applications are identical.