Media Coverage

Thanks to modern consumer expectations and a changing market, manufacturers have become tech companies at heart. That transformation, coupled with a lengthening product lifecycle that now often includes post-production service and maintenance, has made it even more important (and even more possible) that companies truly own their customers’ lifecycle, and choose a technology that will enable them to do so both today and tomorrow.

Boosted by new, easier to use tools and more readily available compute resources, simulation technology is increasingly used more frequently and earlier in the design process, and by a wider array of professionals. However, the path to truly democratized simulation requires both technological and cultural changes. Digital Engineering spoke with some leading industry organizations about progress toward this democratization, and some of the remaining challenges and opportunities.

Taking advantage of the IoT can require product developers to invest in new design methodologies and IT infrastructures, but the potential payoff is huge: better products, improved product development processes, and mutually beneficial customer relationships.

Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are gaining traction, but some say ad hoc exchanges must be part of the record for the digital thread. Digital Engineering takes a look at the trends in Social PLM and what companies are doing to incorporate it into their technology.

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 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.

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).

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

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.