Category

PLM

Dec 29
Le Sommeil (Salvador Dali, 1937)

Propping Up PLM

By PLM No Comments

Why Are Companies Creating Uber-PLM Environments?

“Engineering Cockpit”, “Product Development Dashboard”, “Product Management Environment”, these are but a few actual names of integrated product lifecycle management environments developed by product companies on top of their standard off-the-shelf PLM software. Typically, these are a blend of customizations, integrations, and software add-ons, touted as a better and more comprehensive way to give design engineers a complete view of product information.

Is something wrong here? Isn’t a complete and up to date view of a design information the promise of PLM? Weren’t we told that the PLM system is THE system of record and represent the only version of the truth? Read More

Dec 10

Ranking The PLM Vendors

By PLM 4 Comments

Aras PLM is Challenging the Hegemony of Established PLM Software Vendors

A recent Forrester Wave Report, ranking product lifecycle management (PLM) vendors for discrete product manufacturers. As is typically the response to this type of analyst reports, the report generated multiple responses from participating vendors and industry analysts.

I always find analyst reports such as Forrester’s Wave, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and IDC’s Marketscape, interesting, but difficult to decipher and reconcile, especially when they include rankings based on vague and highly subjective metrics such as “vision” and “cool.” Read More

Nov 08
Section perpendiculaire du moulin des Verdiers (Jean-Jacque Lequeu, 1778)

PLM as an Innovation Platform

By Innovation, PLM No Comments

The Promise of PLM

A recent discussion titled Dassault Systèmes Bets Big on a Product Innovation Platform argues that the role of a PLM platform is to bundle different data sources and enable smooth data exchange among tools, processes and users. While not incorrect, this view is potentially limiting.

File and data interoperability, single source of (electrical/mechanical/software) truth, hardware/software development synchronization, and similar notions have been the core principles of PLM for quite some time; some, in fact, for a very long time. How well PLM vendors achieve these goals is a topic for a separate conversation. Read More

Sep 06

Aras Announces $40 Million Investment Led by Silver Lake

By Mergers & Acquisitions, PLM No Comments

Continuing its strong growth momentum over the past few years, Aras Corp. announced today it has raised $40 Million in a new round of funding from private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and GE Ventures

The funding will be used to expand Aras’s global growth and extend the company’s PLM technology, especially in offering customers comprehensive digital twin capabilities – the ability to create and manage a complete and exact digital replica of a physical product in operation. Aras technology will give Internet of Things (IoT) solution providers and users powerful configuration management tools to establish and manage IoT information in the context of detailed and up-to-date product configuration throughout the extended product life cycle: as designed, as built and installed, as maintained, and as operated.

Aras digital twin expansion strategy continues to build on the growth momentum in IoT services from cloud infrastructure providers such as Azure, AWS, Bluemix, and MindSphere, some of whom are already Aras partners.