Media Coverage

The Goldman Sachs PCI group specializes in growth equity. The group invests directly using Goldman Sachs’ capital. According to Aras, Goldman Sachs focuses on growth companies with significant barriers to entry, breakthrough technology, and experienced management teams. Silver Lake’s inclusion in this D-round shows their continued confidence, especially considering the insight they gained with the board seat they acquired with last year’s investment. CIMdata believes that Goldman Sachs was spot-on in their assessment of Aras.

Schroer says the deepening complexity of these heavily engineered products, from Boeing planes to BMW cars, has ramped up the need to carefully document and plan their development—and put a lot of pressure on companies to reevaluate the capabilities of their current product lifecycle management (PLM) software. “All the sudden this last year, it has become a hot topic: product compliance, complexity, and dealing with [the internet of things], big data. Put all that together and there is a compelling need to put a new PLM system in place,” Schroer argues.

Aras, the leader in open product lifecycle management (PLM) software for the enterprise, today announced that it has acquired Comet Solutions, Inc., a provider of best-in-class software for simulation process management.

“Aras embodies this strategy with a game-changing platform and ‘SaaS Anywhere’ approach that has proven very compelling to customers, and we are excited about Aras’ next stage of growth." -Martin Fichtner, managing director of Silver Lake Kraftwerk.

“To power the next wave of global industrial productivity, GE is investing in critical foundational capabilities for the Industrial Internet," Steve Taub, the managing director of advanced manufacturing and enterprise at GE Ventures, said in a statement.

Given the amount invested and the reputation of the investors, CIMdata sees this as well-deserved recognition of Aras’ position in the global PLM industry, as well as their future potential. Their innovative technology and business model are well proven at this point and continue to gain traction in the marketplace.

Aras has managed to produce a solution that effectively covers what tend to be weak spots in large corporation’s PLM environments: supplier collaboration and simplicity to upgrade. Add in the fact that there are no license fees (Aras is free to download) and it becomes obvious that the solution has a couple very hard-to-resist advantages.

Even more surprising is the announcement from Aras CEO Peter Schroer that the company has appointed Tony Affuso, Siemens PLM's former CEO and a seasoned PLM expert, to its Board of Directors. Tony Affuso was the one responsible for pushing through the deal in which Siemens acquired UGS. This purchase added NX and I-deas (high end CAD), Solid Edge (mainstream CAD), Teamcenter (PDM/PLM), Nastran and Femap (CAE), Tecnomatix and more to the Siemens portfolio.

"We are on fire, the company, since about 2013-2014 has been growing,” said Aras CEO Peter Schroer during his ACE 2017 keynote presentation in front of a slide showing a 51% compound annual growth rate. “I gotta say … it’s because of you guys. The community is pushing us to continue to expand the product, build the scalability, build out the partner community so we can cover you everywhere. I would say the switch to open source, the opening up of everything we do — it’s an experiment and it’s played out perfectly.”

Quality management professionals face the challenge of quickly responding to quality issues and communicating change requirements enterprise-wide. The new Quality Systems (QS) component in Aras QMS connects the proactive and reactive aspects of quality management, and fully integrates quality processes into engineering and manufacturing.

Aras Quality Systems enables Closed-loop corrective action/preventive action (CAPA) – accelerates identification, containment, and analysis of issues, and tracking of affected items; Root cause analysis (RCA) – offers a variety of RCA tools; fault tree analysis, fishbone analysis, and five whys; collaboration – supports quality review through Visual Collaboration, business rules and workflow, and aggregation and packaging of CAP items; and Reporting – provides 8D reporting and tracking of CAPA metrics (% closed, % due).

“With this latest release of Aras Innovator, we continue to expand the Aras PLM Platform, whether building out the Quality Management System application for the specific needs of quality professionals or extending the platform to connect Engineering, Manufacturing, and Service to enable Digital Thread."

Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems Co., Ltd. has selected Aras Innovator to standardize management of drawings, data, design and development processes of the company’s wide portfolio of products. After implementation with Aras Certified Partner Hitachi Systems, Aras will standardize processes in engineering data management and workflow management across the company’s main manufacturing plants in Japan, Thailand and China.

Each year, ACE brings together global industry and technology leaders to exchange best practices on managing complex product development and transforming the science of engineering to the business of engineering.

ACE 2017 features business presentations from Huntington Ingalls, Microsoft, Valley Fine Foods, IBM, Akrapovič, Carestream, Sandia, Lord, Pabst, and other industry leaders. In addition, application and demo tracks feature overviews of the latest version of the Aras PLM Platform, including MPP, Tech Docs, and Quality Management, and presentations on PLM implementation strategy.

Former French president Charles de Gaulle once famously complained about the difficulty of governing a country that had 246 different kinds of cheese. In the time since that statement was made, life for both societies and enterprises has become even more complicated, and the hardship of ruling diversity, illustrated by this “cheese analogy,” has grown exponentially

Aras today announced key industry presentations and sessions for ACE 2017, the company’s marquee customer conference taking place on March 21st to 23rd in Nashville, TN. The gathering is the premier event that connects the most innovative product development, IT, and manufacturing teams from Automotive, Aerospace & Defense, High Tech Electronics, and Industrial Manufacturing to shape the future of PLM.

IBM, Aras Corporation and OSI Soft today are launching new IBM Digital Twin capabilities, to create multiple views of products by bringing together various ‘digital threads’ and data streams that can be tailored to the needs of a particular user.

Schaeffler´s Engineering Cockpit provides up to 20,000 users with role-based access to information across multiple disciplines, interfaces, systems, and authoring tools to make better decisions. The collaboration with Schaeffler is the first result of the partnership between Aras and IBM that was announced in December last year.

Digital transformation is one of the key issues at Schaeffler. The Engineering Cockpit application is one of the central tools to connect all disciplines and systems. The Engineering Cockpit is a web-based application allowing direct access to development data for a large number of development centers. It supports the company-wide configuration and change management in the initial phase.

LORD, a leading global manufacturer of adhesives, coating, sensing and motion technologies, selected Aras Innovator due to a scalable, robust and flexible PLM capabilities to accommodate changing business and market condition, as well as future acquisitions anticipated by the manufacturer, a model-based, service-oriented architecture that delivers low total cost of ownership without reducing the long term vision of the project and more.

LORD Corporation, a global manufacturer of adhesives, coating, sensing and motion technologies, selected Aras Innovator® to standardize product development processes at current sites, and to help the company efficiently support emerging businesses. When fully implemented, LORD anticipates more than 1,000 users will access Document Management, Configuration Management, Engineering Change Management, as well as Quality Systems (CAPA) applications as part of the Aras PLM platform.

LORD Corporation is transforming their business of engineering due to the flexibility, scalability, and common architecture offered by Aras PLM. The company is better positioned to easily and quickly integrate new acquisitions, while standardizing current engineering and product development sites onto one common platform.