Peter Schroer さんのアクティビティ

What our acquisition of Comet Solutions brings to the Aras community

Peter Schroer — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 12:11:00 GMT

Good morning,

I wanted to personally send a note to our community to tell you about our acquisition of Comet Solutions and share some thoughts on what it means for the Aras Community.

We have been on the journey together to develop a modern PLM platform built on openness and community input. Many of you have been thinking about the next phase of product development around Digital Twin and predictive maintenance. Simulation, along with MRO, are two of the key pieces to get there.

Simulation is already an important part of product development, and we only see it growing in utility. However, we need to unlock its value by connecting it to mainstream design.

To date, simulation process and data management (SPDM) has not been implemented well in the industry, and our opportunity now is to do for simulation what we have done for PLM - provide an open, flexible, scalable platform approach. The addition of Comet Solutions will help us get there.

Comet Solutions provides simulation tool management to help the analysts be more productive by reusing simulations and orchestrating simulation tool chains. Those capabilities are important to help scale the volume of simulation. Our goal is to get simulation into mainstream design and onto the Digital Thread for traceability, collaboration, and all those benefits. This is where Comet’s capability connected to our platform delivers flexibility and the opportunity to expand simulation's use across the enterprise.

Previously, we issued a press release that outlines what we see as core tenets to ready organizations for higher volume of simulation. It also provides context for the Comet acquisition. You can read that release here.

Almost exactly a year ago, we announced funding from Silver Lake and GE with the goal to go faster, deliver better performance, and add more functionality. With the acquisition of Comet Solutions, we now have the means to connect simulation to operating configuration (and vice versa) for predictive maintenance and closed-loop feedback.

As we bring more capability onto the platform, the one continuing ask I have for all of you is: use as much functionality as possible that we are providing! It's all yours to build what you can imagine.

Sincerely,

Peter Schroer

CEO & Founder, Aras

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Peter Schroer

Peter Schroer — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:44:49 GMT

To the PLM Community

Peter Schroer — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 12:06:00 GMT

Today, global companies are faced with a series of both opportunities and challenges.

Innovative new products are being developed for global markets, manufacturing efficiency and productivity are better than ever, and supplier collaboration is providing improved visibility across the value chain.

At the same time customers are becoming more sophisticated, demanding and impatient while costs are rising, competition is fierce and product complexity continues to increase.

Together these trends are driving businesses around the world to rethink Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

At Aras we recognize that to succeed in the future your company will need PLM to continue to achieve faster time to market, greater product quality and further performance improvements. To engineer the high value products of tomorrow PLM will be necessary to coordinate processes and collaborate globally.

You want industry best practices combined with the ability to continuously improve and create unique processes which give your company advantage over competitors.

My founding vision for Aras came from the fact that every company has specialized processes and complex data, and that PLM software should be adapted to fit your requirements, rather than the business compromised to fit the software. At Aras everything we do builds on this premise.

Our PLM is designed for global leaders that have complicated products where PLM is a necessity not an option. It's used by businesses that must constantly change to compete in tomorrow's world markets such as Boeing, GE and Hitachi.

We understand the complexity of designing the next generation of aircraft, vehicles, electronics and life sciences products. We know how to assure regulatory compliance and secure critical intellectual property. We know how important PLM performance is when thousands of suppliers are working in the system at the same time.

And we know you're going to need to change everything tomorrow to win new business.

That's why we built Aras Innovator. To provide companies like yours with a complete PLM solution suite on the advanced technology that will be necessary for the next 10 years of complexity and change. Because you can't engineer the future with yesterday's PLM.

Our approach is to enable corporate process change for continuous improvement and transformation through highly flexible and open enterprise solutions. We believe that openness is critical to the long term success and sustainability of your company's enterprise PLM backbone. Your company must have control over your own destiny, and the only way to truly achieve this is through openness in your enterprise systems environment, especially in PLM.

We also understand that in order for your PLM strategy to be successful you need commitment from people you can trust for the long term. For over a decade, together with our partners around the world, we have been dedicated to delivering world class service and support.

We believe we offer the best PLM platform, solutions, and with the help of our partners, the best knowledge and support for your business.

Moving forward you'll need to control MCAD, ECAD and ALM processes, manage more complex Bills of Material, bring together data from numerous other enterprise systems, securely enable global supply chain access, provide systems engineering functionality, make mobile a reality and probably provide some form of cloud or hybrid cloud capabilities.

If your company is driving innovation, if you develop products on more than three continents, if your supply chain is taking on greater design authority and you need to manufacture integrated systems, then you've got real PLM challenges that call for a new approach to PLM.

Find out what XEROX, Honda, Motorola, Mitsubishi and thousands of other companies around the world already know. Aras is Different.

We encourage you to Be Different.

Discover your next PLM at Aras.com.

Sincerely,

Peter Schroer

CEO & Founder, Aras

PLM Without Limits is Magic!

Peter Schroer — Mon, 14 May 2018 10:30:00 GMT

The late author, Arthur C. Clarke, formulated three adages known as Clarke's Three Laws, of which the third law is the best known: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As it happens, some in the PLM industry think that Aras’s extreme flexibility and the ability to continuously upgrade heavily customized PLM instances, year after year, is “magic.” And, after all, who really believes in magic? The fact is, the reality is not nearly exciting as the speculation. At the end of the day, good execution of a very simple idea, Behavioral Modeling, transcends the hype of the ‘next-big-thing’ in IT technology.

There’s been some recent banter about flexibility and customization in PLM solutions—most notably Oleg Shilovitsky’s recent post From Flexible Data Models and Free Upgrades to Autonomous Data Services—about whether or not Aras is positioned to embrace potential future trends such as No-SQL autonomous data management.

Let me clarify a few things:

Aras is already doing what some have claimed to be the future of PLM.
Aras is not just SQL under the covers.
The world does not want a single massive, crowd controlled PLM data model. The reason flexibility is such an important topic in PLM is that each company (each division, each business unit, each working group) needs a different data model and workflows, and they need to change them again next month. They don’t want a massively shared crowd defined data model.

At one point the phrase was… Cloud changes everything. It didn’t.

Now it seems No-SQL is the answer and will change everything. It won’t.

The point is to build a PLM Platform that is independent of Oracle vs Microsoft, of Cloud vs. On-Prem, or Multi-Tenant vs Single-Tenant, and also of SQL vs No-SQL. The Aras architecture is not built on any of these and is not limited by any of the known limitations of any of these. We don’t care where the services run and where the data store is. All that can (and will) change over time while the customer’s highly customized PLM keeps running, and remains flexible. It’s the Modeling Engine not the underlying IT technology that is the breakthrough.

Silver Lake Funding

Peter Schroer — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:05:00 GMT

Last week, we announced a $40M investment from Silver Lake and GE. I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts about what it means for our company and for our community.

First and foremost, we are using the funding to do what our community of subscribers and open users want us to - respond to their ideas and feature requests, add more and more functionality and apps, and continue our approach that has redefined conceptions of PLM. This investment will help us do more for our user community - and do it faster.

We remain fully committed to our open approach. The investment from Silver Lake and GE does not change our focus on open community, our freely available software, our straight-forward pricing, or our subscription model that packs in as much as possible.

Silver Lake and GE recognized the power of our model – and the significance for the market: Nowhere else can you download PLM software, evaluate it, and even influence the roadmap, without paying anything. The result is a PLM experience built on collaboration and openness that the industry is strongly welcoming.

I encourage you to engage with our community and exchange ideas. Many of you face the same challenges managing product development and processes. We believe in the power of a large international community of PLM practitioners working together to solve the most challenging problems. We welcome your participation.

We believe there's a different way of doing PLM than companies have been forced to in the past - and there's no barrier for you to download Aras and create the unique PLM experience that you want.

Sincerely,

Peter Schroer
CEO & Founder, Aras

IoT – Good News Is…You’re Not Too Late

Peter Schroer — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 16:46:00 GMT

Is IoT the next Game Changer? The next big hype? Or is it just a good business practice that engineering driven companies like EMC were already doing 20 years ago.

Hype cycles can be very compelling. And so is the CEO yelling in your ear “Why don’t I have IoT yesterday?” Let’s ask ourselves why. Industry 4.0, IoT, what is the primary purpose? What are you going to do with all that data? And are you really ready to design things with software, electronics, cloud connections? You have been making sneakers for 50 years – how are your electronics skills?

Here is the problem with jumping on the hype rollercoaster. Before you put that first chip in the shoe, you have to know what you are trying to measure. This comes back to a business strategy discussion. There is nothing technical here. You need to be asking WHY? Why are we doing this? Why will the customer want this? Is there really a benefit to adding new electronics, software, and an app to the toothbrush that worked perfectly fine without it? Who is paying for this development and increased product costs?

Once you answered WHY and you feel good about that, now you can talk about the HOW. How are you going to put this technology into your product? Our partner Microsoft has a great IOT platform on Azure that includes templates for experimenting, an IoT library, data aggregators, and BI tools. What I really like is you can use this toolbox to mock up and prototype your ideas. But that’s just protyping and innovation. Microsoft and Aras agree that there is a big HOW that you still need to consider. Next step after the lab prototypes is to design into your product the sensors that you need for the telemetry that is meaningful for exactly your product – sensors, software, cloud data aggregation, feedback to your PLM system,… lots of moving parts. You better have a Systems Engineering platform in place, because you are now managing something very very complex.

The good news is you’re not too late. It takes time to get a new product to market. Your literally talking about running some experiments, figure out what is meaningful then put the dreams of IoT big-data and revenues away for 2 years… Bad news for the CEO, but IoT is not something you turn on yesterday. An IoT strategy must be formed, the useful sensors must be designed into a product that gets completely designed, developed, manufactured, packaged, shipped and 2 years later they’re out on the street phoning home for the first time. This is moonshot kind of stuff. You plan for half a decade before you get meaningful feedback.

Let’s take a common sense approach. Design your POC to validate the kind of data you can get. In parallel someone needs to be thinking about what is meaningful big-data to be collecting. Move that work back into the design process. And this is where you better be taking a Systems Engineering approach because we are not just talking about YOUR product and its software, but the thing that it connects to and the feedback loop to your PLM for your design and field maintenance teams.

The good news is you are not behind the curve. But pragmatically, it is time to start learning Systems Engineering and get a PLM system in place. Because PLM is Systems Engineering and IoT is all about YOUR Business of Engineering. Why are you putting IoT into your product? How are you doing it? How are you validating it? These are business decisions you make to create great products that are profitable and loved by your customer.

Posted Thu, Mar 31 2016 5:46 PM by Peter Schroer

The Wizarding World of PLM

Peter Schroer — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 08:06:00 GMT

I talked to another company today who is still hoping to find the "Harry Potter" brand PLM solution. We hear this a lot.

They want us to listen to their problem, look it up in the Standard Book of Spells, find the right recipe, and create exactly the out-of-the-box potion that instantly cures their specific problem. No consulting, no executive management commitment, no hard choices and decisions, and no messy organizational change negotiations. If the only problem was CAD file management, OK, we could deliver such an instant cure for that ailment, no magic required! But managing CAD better is never the real business problem.

Product configuration issues, poor quality/reliability, uncoordinated change management, chaotic resource scheduling…these are the real business challenges. The Standard Book of Spells does not give us a single best practice for change management that works equally well for high volume / short lifecycle consumer product, configure to order industrial equipment and aerospace model/variant long lifecycle use cases.

"But wait Peter, aren’t these available as Standard Industry Best Practices Solutions? That’s what the other PLM sales person says I should buy. They already have an out-of-the-box solution that not only is perfect for my specific industry, but also for those unique engineering processes that make us competitive."

Now that is Magic!

This is why Aras is the #1 PLM choice for companies who already bought a Legacy PDM. When you are done believing in magic and actually want to improve your business; be ready to do some work, make the investment, and trust in a flexible PLM Platform that can adapt to meet your specific needs. Fast, safe, resilient customizable PLM software - for today AND for those completely unknown business requirements that will sneak up on us tomorrow.

MBA 101: Is that $10M you spent on PLM (so far) an Investment or a Sunk Cost?

Peter Schroer — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 08:17:00 GMT

It’s not uncommon for Aras to meet with the IT staff or engineers at a manufacturing company and hear that they are committed to their current PDM/PLM/CAD software provider. What is the basis for this loyalty?

Survey says?! 0% due to the great success of the implementation and 100% attribute their loyalty to the significant amount they have invested to date.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, the PLM industry as a whole deserves a C- grade for results (nice GPA average when you include the B+ in Marketing and A+ in Sales Effectiveness). Engineering data and processes are highly complex. And the complexity has always been growing faster than the available solutions can handle.

Every company we meet is still struggling to correctly vault and manage 3D CAD files, while the original ROI for PLM included the traditional cast of characters - BOM, Change, Manufacturing, etc. What happened to those other data and process requirements? Check in the PLM Underground.

So we managed to get 3D CAD configurations under control. That’s not too bad right? Or did we? Unfortunately, most of the PLM users we talk to have achieved CAD file archiving. A fancy name for an expensive vault at the end of the design process for Check-In. Cue the theme music - Hotel California. We’re checking-in files and not using them again. What happened to adding value to the day-to-day work-in-process engineering design management?

Loyalty is a wonderful thing, but ask your kid who just finished his first semester at that expensive business school, "What does Sunk Cost mean?" It’s only an Investment if the time/cost to complete the mission is lower than starting from scratch, t=0, reboot, clean sheet of paper.

Only you can answer this question, because every engineering process is different, everyone’s expectations for PLM are different, and everyone's current #1 mission critical business problem is different. Are you really tracking to solve all the PLM problems with your current approach? Or would new technology, new methodology, and new partners drive a result better, faster, and cheaper? Are you sitting on a Valuable Investment or a Sunk Cost?

Let it go. Write it off. Take a bold step…Or that new hire MBA kid who’s occupying your office next will do it for you.

The Business of Engineering Explained

Peter Schroer — Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:17:00 GMT

3 Questions with Aras CEO and Founder, Peter Schroer

Product complexity has increased exponentially over the last two decades as electronics and now software dominate almost every type of product. Manufacturers face multiple challenges: managing product integrity without adequate software development disciplines; managing the involvement of suppliers who control critical technologies; ensuring operational safety for products being updated in the field; and ensuring compliance with regulations.

Traditional PDM technologies have failed to keep pace. Their legacy architectures with tightly interdependent hard-coded applications, data and process models result in systems that take years to implement and are complex and expensive to upgrade. Worst of all, legacy PDM systems are focused on managing 3D CAD designs – the Science of Engineering, leaving other critical processes including software, electronics, requirements, process planning, technical publications and quality – the Business of Engineering - disconnected and under-served.

In your view, what is meant by the term “the Business of Engineering?”

For today’s manufacturing enterprise, the primary job of engineering is business – to create the products that can be sold profitably. This has many implications such as to meet customer requirements, to minimize liability, to deliver on the most sustainable, lowest development costs and the lowest manufacturing costs and other key business considerations.

Too many of our competitors and the market analysts love to hype the value of Innovation. But the job of engineering is not to design cool products. It is to create profitable products -- i.e. business. A focus on “The Business of Engineering” is understanding the whole lifecycle of the product, and managing all the impact (manufacturing costs, liability, risk, etc.) This used to be called “Design For X” where X = manufacturability, testability, supportability.

Why is it important for a manufacturing enterprise to distinguish between the “science” of engineering and the “business” of engineering?

The important thing is balance. For the past 20 years, the market (including analysts, software vendor marketing, and universities) has driven deep investment into 3D CAD, Simulation, and DMU (expert level visualization). The Science of Engineering is important, but without balance, without a matching investment in Business of Engineering, manufacturers struggle to produce profitable products.

Manufacturing, Quality, Supply Chain, Packaging, Configuration Management, Logistics, Field Support, Requirements Management – these are just a few of the critical roles and tasks required to produce profitable products. But if you take an honest look at manufacturers, the majority of the product-related data and processes across the enterprise and supply chain are still manual, paper, email, Excel, Lotus Notes, DropBox, FTP, and home-grown systems.

What are the top strategies manufacturers should consider in terms of meeting the challenges of product development into the next decade?

The current reality is that manufacturers face rapid changes in compliance, liability, global competition, distributed supply chains, increasing complex software and electronics content, the Internet of Things, and many more factors. Products are no longer mechanical only, and can no longer be designed in a vacuum. Everyone becomes a Systems Engineer. In terms of a top strategy recommendation, it’s imperative for manufacturers to rethink their PLM strategy and consider how to impact the Business of Engineering. We need to replace all the chaos with a platform that efficiently supports the new business requirements

Posted Tue, Jan 26 2016 4:17 PM by Peter Schroer

The PLM Underground

Peter Schroer — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 12:20:00 GMT

From the CEO's perspective, "Everything is OK because I spent a lot of money on PLM."

But the reality is, there is a shadow PLM, a PLM black-ops system that is really powering development, manufacturing, quality and the supply chain. It's OK until something happens. Ask yourself, do you want to risk your company? An FDA Letter? RoHS Compliance delaying shipments? Fatal accidents with unbounded liability?

In the press, you read about the phenomenal growth of Aras’s PLM market share, replacing TeamCenter, Windchill, and Enovia. But are we really replacing these systems? How do you replace something that was never fully deployed? To be clear, all these systems were huge IT success stories. Purchased. Customized. Deployed. Several years of maintenance has been paid. But when you dig one layer deeper, these expensive systems were never deployed.

The evidence is everywhere. The PLM Underground is easily visible at the fringes. Do you have any Excel spreadsheets with 40 tabs and hundreds of Macros? That’s your PLM system. Look at the network bandwidth between your site and DropBox. Yup, there is your secure supply chain collaboration. The PLM Underground is sending your corporate IP via email, FTP and DropBox to suppliers. If we ignore the data security issues for a minute, where’s the control, are you sure that the shadow PLM is correctly delivering the right versioned files and BOM’s? Let’s ask your Quality department what they are seeing at incoming. Of course they have their own Shadow PLM - 2D drawings, Excel, and paper ECO documents. This is what they compare incoming components against. The blind leading the Blind.

So now we understand Aras’s tremendous growth rate. We are not replacing TeamCenter, WindChill, and Enovia. They were never deployed. Aras is replacing the Shadow PLM underground, with cost effective, easy to deploy, easy to use solutions. We power the Business of Engineering and it’s time to get back to business.

Posted Mon, Jan 18 2016 1:20 PM by Peter Schroer

If all you have is Teamcenter Everything Becomes a 3D CAD Problem

Peter Schroer — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:15:00 GMT

The Needs of a Few Should Not Outweigh The Needs of Many

Is highly automating the use cases of a few hundred individuals working on one product information authoring tool really the best use of resources? Where is the ROI? The business case? What about the thousands of other engineers managing documents, requirements, embedded software, electronic designs, manufacturing routings, quality… ? Isn’t most of your product information in a format other than 3D CAD anyway?

No question the 3D CAD problem is a thorny one. The 3D CAD vendors have created very complex file configuration management problems. Independent of how you manage your enterprise product lifecycle, you have to worry about breaking the configuration integrity of these fragile 3D CAD systems.

So, what should you do? Make the engineers happy? Focus on the rest of the enterprise?

For starters, here are some questions you should be asking yourself:

Given the unique complexity of the 3D CAD problem, do you really expect that a single enterprise tool will be able to manage the entire product information data set and processes? Or is it better to manage CAD with the PDM system provided by the CAD vendor, and use a more suitable enterprise system to manage the majority of the product information and processes?
Do you really need to manage the more exotic 3D CAD behaviors that the CAD vendors are (self-servingly) promoting? Of course these behaviors can only be managed well by the CAD vendor’s embedded PDM system. Alternatively, is there a perfectly acceptable and reliable option with an enterprise class tool that manages the file configurations and use cases more simply and, for the most part, effectively?
Should you allow a few engineers and a 3D CAD vendor set your product lifecycle strategy? Most enterprise PLM systems accurately manage 3D CAD file configurations very well. BUT for each 3D CAD application there are those exotic functions that can only be managed by one Vendor’s PDM. Are you really willing to make the tradeoffs this requires in the rest of your business?

It comes down to this: Do the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many? Or was Spock right when he said “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”?

Thousands of end users managing the true majority of product information and use cases have been asked to wait decades while exotic 3D CAD centric PLM systems are deployed to the specification and requirements of the few design engineers. But what is the missed opportunity cost to the business?

You really need to ask yourself: Do you have an enterprise product lifecycle management business opportunity or a 3D CAD file configuration control problem?

Teamcenter is an excellent tool for managing NX CAD file configurations and maybe also for CATIA, but just because your design engineers have selected Teamcenter, do you then need to cast every business problem and every business process as a 3D CAD problem?

The risk are many and the costs are high… maybe Spock was right.

CIOs Cautioned To Change Their Thinking or Risk Power & Budgets

Peter Schroer — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 07:50:00 GMT

WSJ CIO Network Summit: CIOs need to start thinking more like CFOs or they will slowly forfeit their power to other C-level colleagues.

CIO Insight recently reported on the second Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference. For those not familiar with this event, it is a series of open sessions and private meetings of rock star Fortune 500 CIOs. The nature of the meetings enabled the CIOs to speak freely among themselves – there were actually guards posted outside the rooms – and a few lucky journalists got to observe the open sessions.

In the article, titled: New-Gen IT Requiring CIOs to Think More Like CFOs, 4 key findings from the conference were reported:

CEOs are now asking CIOs to think more like CFOs. This year, CIOs will be required to better convey their value in pure financial terms...
CIOs will not permit do-it-yourself IT simply for its own sake or because it's easier, ostensibly more efficient, and unshackled to corporate red tape… Even among mid-range and smaller enterprises, the idea of building a custom solution is becoming more and more a liability.
2014 is clearly the Year of the End User... CIOs must cater to those using their services—or else they will lose to easy-to-use and free-to-obtain external services.
4. CIOs will also need to become more advanced marketers within their own realms. Some may go so far as to hire internal marketers to keep end-user market share within the company.

I read this with my PLM hat on of course, and I couldn't help but think how Aras and the Aras business model make even more sense for corporate CIOs than ever.

CIOs are being asked to think like CFOs and convey value in financial terms – Aras is an enterprise scale product lifecycle management solution with no PLM license fees. This means start-up costs are dramatically lower than other PLM / PDM alternatives and there is no cost when you expand to more employees, supply chain partners, customers, etc. What's more, if you're looking to replace a legacy PLM system, all you need to do is transition your maintenance dollars over to your Aras subscription. No capital expenditure required. It really is that easy.

CIOs will not permit do-it-yourself IT; building a custom solution is becoming a liability – Of course it is. It always has been. But you did it because it was the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to get what you and your users needed. Aras gives you the best of both worlds: a highly-secure, standards-based PLM platform that is designed to be tailored to your business needs. And we include upgrade services in our annual subscription fee, so you never have worry about costly upgrade expenses or being stuck on outdated technology.

2014 is the Year of the End User; CIOs must cater to those using their services – Aras enables you to give your users what they want, as fast as they want it. Our modeling engine approach means that nobody is writing code every time they need to add a field or change a process. Our drag and drop environment enables real-time changes at the speed of business. With Aras you can stay responsive to end users, and maintain data integrity and IP security without becoming a deep-dive expert in yet another obscure proprietary programming tool.

Some CIOs will hire internal marketers to keep end-user market share within the company – Sorry, we can't provide marketing services but you won't need them with Aras. When your users are happy, your CFO is happy, your external business partners are happy and your corporate IT support teams are happy, the good news travels all by itself.

If you're thinking about PLM for the first time or you need to replace an outdated system that doesn't meet the needs of your growing, modern business, take a look at Aras. You can download Aras PLM right now and get started or give this paper from CIMdata a read to find out why Aras is the future of PLM.

Cars & PLM: Why Are They So Difficult To Buy?

Peter Schroer — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 11:47:00 GMT

I read this article: "Is the auto franchise system a lemon" in my Sunday paper back in May. Since it's November and I'm still thinking about it, I decided a blog post was in order.

The article is about the auto industry and the fact that BY LAW automobile manufacturers cannot sell us their products directly. You see, their products are too complex and we just wouldn't understand them. So we need car dealers to help us out. Really? Have you ever met a car salesman who could explain anything to you? He can't even sell you a car without “checking with the manager” every five minutes. As a result, we pay 6-9% more for our cars because we have to buy them from dealers. Tesla is trying to change this model, but the auto dealers aren't going to give up their sweet ride (pun intended) without a fight.

The fact is, that the world is changing. It has changed. Buyers can research everything on the Internet and make their own buying decisions. We don't need sales people to tell us what we need anymore. It's true for cars. And it's true for enterprise software.

If Oracle is willing to discount Agile PLM software licenses at 90%, why not just publish that price and eliminate the months of time consuming and annoying negotiation between the salesperson and the buyer? As Keane says in his article, "Why is it that even as we sign the papers, we suspect that somehow and in some way we've been bilked?" The old school way of buy and selling enterprise software destroys trust, creates an adversarial relationship, and in the end does nothing to solve customer's business issues.

I believe Tesla and companies like them – like Aras - are the future. Besides their very cool cars, I like that Tesla is changing the entire car owning experience, starting at the moment you walk onto the lot. They offer a great product, transparent pricing and all information you need on the web. After a simple test drive, you decide for yourself if that's the car for you.

It's a lot like choosing Aras PLM. You can watch self-service demos and videos, and read reviews and case studies from other customers. You can talk directly to those customers online, by phone or at any of our free user conferences. You can download the software, install it and try it in your environment. And then you can decide, for yourself, if Aras fits your needs. Suggest that to a legacy PLM sales rep and see what happens. My guess: he'll ask you if you've had lunch or feel like playing a round of golf.

So, Aras Community members, if you agree with our approach, if you like our process and our product, add your voice to the Community. Help us be even more transparent. Help the next 1,000 community members learn about the open PLM difference. We want more user product reviews and opinions. Comment on our blogs, post to our LinkedIn and Facebook pages, chime in on our Forums and attend and participate in our Aras Community Events.

Aras CAD Connector Strategy: Chaos or Genius?

Peter Schroer — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 07:55:00 GMT

I am often asked why Aras has multiple CAD Connectors for the same CAD application. The reason is simple: we believe in healthy competition. By inviting all the partners in the Aras open PLM community to create competing CAD Connectors, we ensure higher quality and customer support, and encourage ongoing development and product improvement. But the #1 reason is that there are several different approaches to creating a PLM-CAD Connector; use cases and UIs that are CAD centric, use cases and UIs that are PLM centric, and a middleware/DropBox style.

The Aras open PLM community is about freedom of choice and we believe in providing Aras users with options when choosing their Connector(s).

To ensure data integrity, optimize CAD performance, integrate with Aras's Secure Social 3D Visualization tools and maintain a true open framework within Aras Innovator, we created a standard CAD API, standard CAD data models and standard PLM use cases. We recommend that our partners to adhere to this framework, and then we evaluate and certify the CAD Connectors that follow the standard. As I said, this results in higher quality connectors, as well as more standardized training and support, and common approaches in situations when end-users need to run multiple CAD systems in parallel. It also makes it easier for our users to switch Connector partners in the future if they choose.

When creating their Connectors, each partner has the freedom to innovate on the UI and use cases within the CAD system. Some Connectors have the look-and-feel of the CAD system, while others look and feel more like the PLM. Some CAD Connectors include high value-add functions that automate repetitive design tasks or simplify collaboration.

So the next question is, how do you choose?

My recommendation is to see a demo from each of the Aras partners to find out:

Which one has the UI and CAD use cases that most closely align with your requirements?
Which connector has the value-add functions that your end-users can benefit from?
Which is certified by Aras and most closely aligned with the Aras standard CAD Connector API and Data Model?

Learn more about the Aras approach to CAD Integration.