February 16, 2023 - 11:00 a.m. ET

When it comes to effective communication, context is key. Many design teams use email or spreadsheets to relay information. Texting, IM, Excel worksheets, and email are pervasive tools but are not traceable to the item (Part, Physical Part, Requirements, Next Generation Design), therefor context is lost, and the Digital Thread is broken. Manual methods are disconnected, error-prone, and take effort to connect the dots leading to product failures and missed deadlines.

Visual Collaboration enables teams to track information around an object inside of the context of that item. This eliminates diverging conversations and ensures everyone is on the same page. This enables effective communication in a secure environment, allowing you to work seamlessly across the Enterprise. Product content, including documents, drawings, 3D models, and images, are easily viewable. Collaboration on this content is also enabled through commenting and markups.

This demonstration will review Visual Collaboration’s capabilities and highlight the effectiveness of clear communication across Aras Innovator. You will learn how to view and add comments in the Discussions Panel in order to gain visibility into all related content and create markups to effectively communicate changes needed. Most importantly, conversations can evolve around parts and products where the design intent naturally resides rather than between individual people in email.

This demo will be presented by, Crystal Brandl, Visual Collaboration Product Manager, dedicated to delivering a purposeful collaboration tool.

If you are trying to address missteps in the product development process with more meetings and emails, there is a better way. Collaborative, end-to-end traceability within your product ecosystem – yes, including suppliers too, is possible with the Digital Thread using Aras Innovator. Learn how to connect, collaborate, and share product information securely to speed up your product delivery cycles.

Many regulated industries need to know their physical asset real-time operation life values. Extending the Digital Twin to update and monitor physical BOM assets life rates as they operate in the field significantly improves operational effectiveness.

Tracking of life parameter data opens up opportunities such as short, medium, and long-term maintenance planning activities for multiple land, air, or marine-based physical assets. Alternatively using the Aras Innovator platform, customers can extend the Digital Twin Core application to support GPS location monitoring or asset operational performance.

In this session, using Digital Twin Core, we will show a step by step approach to introduce life parameters to physical assets supplementing the individual Digital Twin configurations for any asset in any industry. This session will also review how to manage updates to Physical Asset BOM at the time when assets have operated in the field, and how the operational data is input, ensuring the most up to date reflection of what the physical asset is, thereby improving maintenance effectiveness.

Join Graeme Taylor, Aras Product Manager a live demonstration of how the Aras PLM Platform can easily enable Digital Twin life management including:

• Building life parameters and relating these to Digital Twin Physical Parts

• Creating a Powerful user experience with a Digital Twin using Aras Dynamic Product Navigation

• Exploring connections to critical information related to a Digital Twin using Aras Graph Navigation

As the complexity of products increase and customers demand more choices and options, managing product variability gets increasingly more difficult. This makes an effective variability process across design, configure to order, and manufacturing a key business objective and a critical competitive differentiator. Today, many companies manage product variability via spreadsheets and standalone tools without digital traceability to the related design structures. These processes are manual, disconnected, highly susceptible to human error, and difficult to scale.

Aras provides product variant management as part of its Aras Innovator Platform—making it an integral part of the product’s Digital Thread. You can manage and evolve the variability model along with the development of design structures while maintaining digital traceability between the two across the entire product lifecycle. The development and evolution of product variability become a highly efficient process. You can quickly identify errors in the resulting variability when applying it to various representations of the product design.

Join Ayla Singhal, Product Manager at Aras, for a 30-minute demonstration to learn more about Variant Management, including how to:

• Define and manage product variability, using features, options, and rules

• Organize variability into a hierarchical structure so that the variability definition can be managed at each level and then combined/aggregated

• Manage configurable breakdown structures with common and variable content, based on a modular product architecture paradigm

• Apply product variability to the variable content in configurable structures

• Resolve configurable structures to specific product configurations by specifying a set of options

• Trace product variability using Digital Thread navigation

This webinar will showcase how the Aras community is realizing the vision of a single integrated Digital Thread to own the lifecycle—from engineering and manufacturing processes, to maintenance and operation. Product engineering and manufacturing process planning in Aras Innovator are the most widely-used applications across our community. Learn how new Aras applications are advancing design and production for companies by incorporating real-time field feedback, operational data, Digital Twin simulation, and multidisciplinary change management.

Viewing lightweight CAD files is nice, but querying the 3D data set for various attributes and seeing the results in graphical space is so much more useful.

Join Product Manager, Kevin Richard, to see how Aras' new Dynamic Product Navigation solution enables users to apply query definitions against rich 3D datasets to answer various design question in the context of the assembly graphics. Users can view assemblies according to release status, simulation results, relating problem reports, service bulletins, or any other part attribute.

DPN along with the query builder and tree grid view will change the way engineers interface with their data by searching in the context of the assembly and interacting with the parts from the viewer window.

How does your company define the Digital Twin? Digital Twins in Aras leverage your product’s Digital Thread data, comprehensive visualization, powerful change and configuration management, and the complete suite of Aras applications – plus a few new ones – to add rich context and usability to the Digital Twins you will launch to the field. 

This demonstration, the first in our Digital Twin Series, will feature newly released functionality to improve maintenance effectiveness by building and managing Digital Twin configurations able to access their own critical information in the Digital Thread–every time the physical asset changes. 

In this session, we will show a step-by-step approach to creating and managing individual Digital Twin configurations for any product in any industry.  We’ll review how Aras manages the changes in Digital Twin every time relevant maintenance occurs, providing the most complete, up-to-date information about the physical asset to improve maintenance effectiveness.

Join Graeme Taylor, Aras Product Manager, for a live demonstration of how the Aras PLM Platform enables Digital Twins in context with their Digital Thread data, including:

• Building and managing any Digital Twin configuration with Aras Physical Asset Foundation

• Creating a powerful user experience with a Digital Twin using Aras Dynamic Product Navigation

• Exploring connections to critical information in the Digital Thread related to a Digital Twin using Aras Graph Navigation

Ability to establish and maintain traceability of requirements to all system, design, testing and manufacturing data throughout the product’s life cycle is critical to managing Digital Thread and Digital Twin. It is an essential part of a digital transformation critical to managing ever-increasing product complexity.

Built as a native capability of the Aras PLM platform, Aras Requirements Engineering application enables capturing of requirements as a structured content including reuse of common elements access different requirements (ex: graphics or tables of values). It also provides requirements traceability to all system and product details, and enables configuration management of that traceability across the entire product lifecycle.

During this 30-minute presentation, you will see how requirement content is created, how it is related to items managed by Aras PLM platform, and how that platform’s change and configuration management helps to establish and maintain traceability. Traceability which is maintained across the entire product life-cycle and across all elements of all design abstractions.

Join Michael Pfenning, Aras Product Manager and Systems Engineering expert, to learn how the Aras Requirements Engineering application and the underlying PLM Platform enables your organization to reduce lead-times, errors and costs associated with the creation and management of your requirements.

One study showed that up to 20% of an engineer’s day can be wasted looking for and opening files. It is a simple fact that for every CAD model that needs to be managed there are multiple documents. Mismanagement of documents, spreadsheets, and process diagrams is critical to maintaining a digital thread. Documents need versioning, security control, and most importantly the context and interdependencies needs to be managed.

Effective document management relies on simplicity. Aras continues to release enhancements to the Aras Office Connector, making it easier than ever to work effortlessly inside the tools users rely on. Innovator makes document management easy eliminating the need to changing environments to find files, templates, or check them in for collaboration.

Join Crystal Brandl, Aras Product Manager, for a 30-minute live demonstration where you will see:

• Visual Collaboration- Auto generated PDFs of saved files support viewing and markup in Aras Visual Collaboration

• Classification- Automated file naming and document number sequencing based on classification categories

• Version Comparison- Automatically show a redline comparison between different versions of the same file

• Property Mapping - Map properties from native Microsoft files to Aras or from Aras to the native Microsoft files, including values in Excel cells

• Outlook Emails - Capture and store Outlook emails with embedded images and attachments as part of the product record in Aras”

Coming soon!

The Aras Component Engineering Application, as part of the Aras PLM Platform, empowers Component Engineers with a single source of Electronic Component information - enabling them to make informed decisions on appropriate components to select from already purchased components or sourcing new components. You will see how the Aras Component Engineering application allows you to select, source, and compare electronic components that meet requirements with access to up-to-date technical, obsolescence, and compliance data from leading manufacturers.

Join Gary Wilmot, Aras Solutions Consultant, to learn how the Aras Component Engineering application allows you to select, source, and compare electronic components that meet requirements, with access to up-to-date technical, obsolescence, and compliance data from leading manufacturers.

During this webinar, you will see how Component Engineering enables you to:

• Manage components and suppliers to build a competitive advantage

• Manage obsolescence risk

• Ensure continued production

• Proactively manage environmental compliance

Simulation has often been disconnected from the rest of the development process, struggling with traceability and the ability to provide meaningful feedback in a timely manner.

In a previous Demo Series, we showed how simulation can now be managed from inside the Aras Innovator platform. Users can capture a simulation process in a template, which can be used and re-used to automate simulations. Best-practice rules and guidelines can be capture in the template, which can lead to improved efficiency (speed), accuracy, repeatability and traceability.

Now, we will show how Aras Innovator can use simulation to evaluate the performance of a design as it progresses, and how the results of simulations can be tied back to Requirements to do closed-loop Verification and validation at every stage of the product lifecycle.

Join Tim Keer, Director Customer Solutions at Aras, to see how Aras Innovator connects simulation to the digital thread.

Aras Innovator version 12 introduces an entirely new client experience to help every Aras user get their work done faster. The navigational architecture of the client has been redesigned to enable users to find the content they need with fewer steps, interfaces have been simplified to clearly identify data and commands that are relevant, and the process of editing data has been updated to be more intuitive for users both experienced and new. Join Kenny Sperling, UX Architect at Aras, as he demonstrates how Aras Innovator version 12 improves productivity and ease of use.

This 30-minute demonstration will highlight the following capabilities:

• Tabs for all Content — easily return to previous searches and work on tasks in parallel with tabs

• Navigation Panel — access the primary navigation from any screen to create new items or start a search

• Command Bars — understand how to find commonly used commands in the simplified and reorganized menus and toolbars

• Edit and Claim — Edit items and Claim them for later edit using new commands which have replaced Lock and Unlock

• Item Views — Navigate through the content of an item using the new accordion and tab based interface

• Favorites — Save a search using new controls and learn about Aras’s plans to unify all types of Favorites, including items, graph views, and more.

Requirements Engineering is the next generation solution for managing requirements within a PLM platform. The convergence of Requirements Engineering and Platform capabilities addresses a weakness in stand-alone requirements management products. Siloed tool sets prevent management of requirements as an integral part of the entire product design process and limits navigation of the underlying digital thread—traceability starting from stakeholder requirements all the way to an asset deployed in the field.

By basing Requirements Engineering on Aras Innovator, a fully developed PLM platform, all requirements instantly become subject to the standard PLM services, such as configuration control, versioning, change management, workflow, lifecycle, and collaboration. This is in addition to being able to relate Requirements to design data (mechanical, electronic, or software) that is already managed by the same platform.

Join Pawel Chadzynski, Aras Sr. Director, Product Management, to learn how you can benefit from the convergence of the Aras Requirements Engineering application and its PLM platform. Specifically:

- How PLM platform services provide formal services for managing requirements configurations, changes, etc.

- How requirements can be reused and revision-controlled individually or as a group (a requirement document)

- How requirements can be formally traced to/from other requirements and to/from any element of a resulting detailed design

- How requirement content can be structured (modeled) according to its purpose (classification)

- How requirement document content can be presented as a single contiguous, formatted, and editable MS Word-like document of all related requirements

- How a team of individuals can collaborate on requirements (content and relationships) under the PLM-enforced permissions and authorizations of the individual users

Managing CAD and Multi-CAD is an essential task for any company. Capturing and leveraging the data for the entire organization is a bigger task. Aras Innovator can manage all of your Multi-CAD CAD data in a single enterprise system.

In this 30-minute session, we will show how Aras Innovator can seamlessly integrate with your existing SolidWorks PDM integration to take advantage of the power of an enterprise PLM as the backbone for change management, while fostering collaboration throughout the entire organization and lifecycle in managing CAD related data from concept to release. We will walk through and demonstrate how Aras integrates directly with your existing SolidWorks and SolidWorks PDM Implementation to leverage the data from your CAD and PDM for the entire organization.

Join Raul Rosa, Aras Product Manager with focus on MCAD for a live demonstration of how the Aras PLM Platform can easily integrate with your existing platform to enable digital thread in areas including:

• Initial concept and product definition

• Design and Change Management

• PLM Integration throughout the product lifecycle

• Traceability of design data throughout the entire digital thread

The Aras PLM Platform provides a number of capabilities for displaying complicated data hierarchies and relationships. Through the Query Builder and Tree Grid View tools, visualizing data in configurable grids has never been easier. Starting in Aras Innovator SP15, we have introduced an entirely new dimension for visualizing and navigating data through the Graph Navigation capability.

In this webinar you will learn to configure a Graph View, customize it to your business needs, and attach it to any type of item in your system. The flexibility, ease of configurability, and ease of use of the Aras Platform that you have come to expect – and maybe even love! – is now extended to providing a way to graphically navigate any aspect of the PLM system. This includes the administration and data model components as well as the product data itself for PLM end users. You’ll never see PLM data in the same way!

Lisa Costa, Technical Solutions Manager, has been at Aras over four years and has been in the PLM, PDM, CAD, and Engineering industries over 30 years.

The Aras PLM Platform already enables organizations to federate data between Aras Innovator and other systems, but we're striving to make it even easier with Aras Federation Services. This groundbreaking prototype brings together the strengths of the Aras Platform with a three-pronged approach:

•Modeling: Model your enterprise data systems and how they're connected, just like you'd model data or processes.
•Services: Platform-level services increase reusability and reduce the need for custom development.
•Extensibility: Leverage community-supported extensions to get up and running - fast!

The ability to establish and maintain traceability of requirements to all system, design and manufacturing data throughout the product’s life cycle is critical to managing Digital Thread and Digital Twin.

Built on the Aras PLM platform and it’s Technical Documentation Framework (TDF), Aras Requirements Engineering application enables capturing of requirements as a structured content, provides requirements traceability to all system and product details, and enables configuration management of that traceability across the entire product lifecycle.

During this 30-minute presentation, you will see how requirement content is created, how it is related to items managed by PLM, and how PLM change and configuration management helps to establish tractability.

Join Lisa Costa. Aras Pre-Sales Solution Manager, to learn how the Aras PLM Platform enables your organization to reduce lead-times, errors and costs associated with the creation and management of your requirements.

The effectiveness of simulation has been held back by the challenges of using multiple disconnected tools for CAD, meshing, FEA and 0D/1D analysis.

SPDM (Simulation Process Data Management) is on the Aras Roadmap and Aras Corporation has recently acquired Comet Solutions, a provider of best-in-class software for simulation process management. Comet Solutions enables simulation experts to be more productive through the creation of simulation processes which can be used to automate the execution of a series of simulation tools without the need for manual data transfer or user execution.

In this presentation, the existing Comet software will be used to explain the benefits of SPDM. You will see how the capture of a simulation process in a template can lead to improved efficiency (speed), accuracy, repeatability and traceability.

Tim Keer has worked in automotive Computer Aided Engineering for 30 years, supporting both production vehicles and methods development projects. He recently joined Aras Corporation when Aras acquired Comet Solutions.

Component Engineers need easy access to up-to-date electronic component information in order to minimize errors, eliminate cost overruns, plan for obsolescence of components and comply with RoHS and other Directives.  They typically access information from many different sources and much of it can be hard to find, incomplete, or obsolete.

The Aras Component Engineering Application provides access to critical information on hundreds of millions of electronic components, electro-mechanical parts and fasteners from over 2,000 worldwide manufacturers in more than 400 categories from the IHS CAPS database. It also provides visibility to which components have already been sourced in the organization, leading to lower purchase costs and less proliferation of the same component from different vendors.

By attending this seminar, you will learn how your Component Engineering sourcing operation can be improved by reducing costs and mitigating risks and delays in your company’s products.

In this seminar you will learn how the Aras Component Engineering Application, as part of the Aras PLM Platform, empowers Component Engineers with a single source of Electronic Component information - enabling them to make informed decisions on appropriate components to select from already purchased components or sourcing new components.

Craig Currie will be presenting, he is a Product Manager at Aras Corp and is responsible for the Component Engineering application.

Effective communication is imperative to the success of a business. Clear and timely communication results in strong requirements and fast innovation. Communication across departments and regions is consistently a challenge, and therefore the communication vehicle is imperative to breaking down those barriers.

Aras’ Visual Collaboration enables effective communication in a secure environment. Product content, including documents, drawings, 3D models, and images, is easily viewable. Collaboration on this content is also enabled through commenting and markups.

This demonstration will review Visual Collaboration’s capabilities and highlight the effectiveness of clear communication across Aras Innovator.

You will learn how to view and add comments in the discussions panel, leverage the viewers to gain visibility into all related content, and create markups to effectively communicate changes needed.

Crystal Brandl is the Visual Collaboration Product Manager, dedicated to delivering a purposeful collaboration tool.

Many companies manage parts, multi-level bill of materials (BOMs), approved vendor and manufacturer lists (AVL/AML). documents and engineering changes in several systems using distinct processes. This makes it difficult to keep the data in synch across systems. Users of the information often needs to go to different applications to find the data they need.

In the Product Engineering application on the Aras PLM Platform product structures are linked to parts, AML/AVL, and documents, and are managed with controlled engineering change processes. Managing the data on a single platform inherently keeps the data in sync, allowing users to navigate, view and author it based on permissions. By controlling this data in one place, engineers will be able to access the correct information, improving productivity, customer satisfaction and your business profitability.

In this demo, you will learn about how engineering data is created, viewed, and updated in Product Engineering using a controlled change process through automated workflow, to increase productivity and reduce redundant entry, errors, and rework.

Ayla Singhal, with 20 years of experience in PLM software and consulting, is a Product Manager at Aras.