Aras Connect Paris 2024 - Fino's Field Report
I had the honor and privilege to attend most of the 2-day Aras Connect customer roadshow in Paris (it was in Sweden last week and moves the Germany next week). There were loads of presentations of Aras Innovator and Aras' strategy along with interesting customer testimonials. This short article will collect what I learned and my impressions from this show.
Attendees and Ambiance - Aras was Rocking the Boat!
Among the 130+ people in attendance were CEO Roque Martin and CMO Josh Epstein as well as local EMEA GM Leon Lauritsen and Senior Director EMEA Sales and Alliances Matthias Fohrer as well as Anthony Ponceot of the CTO Office and Igal Kapstan, the SVP Product Management. Many partners were also present including Razorleaf, Inensia, CIMPA, and Accenture as well as customers such as Nicomatic and Haulotte and recent acquisition XPLM. There was lots of energy and loads of discussions and interactions during all the breaks, the lunch, and the fancy dinner at the nearby River Café on a riverboat!
Keynote: State of Aras, Product Strategy, and the AVEVA Partnership
During his keynote intro speech, Roque mentioned that 75% of new business for Aras is on the cloud with an astonishing 97% retention rate.
Leon Lauritsen continued the keynote with a summary of how Aras sees the digital thread as a way of "Changing the way teams work together to make things" and promoted Aras Innovator SaaS as a Scalable Digital Thread platform.
Igal Kapstan then took the stage to tell us that "the mission of the Aras product organization is to deliver solutions that help product organizations make data-driven decisions." He said that the priorities of the product are (1) productize capabilities with packaged applications and solution templates (2) User experience focused on an emphasis on developer and end-user productivity (3) API layer to simplify integrations and extend Aras capabilities for managing broader segment of the digital thread, and finally (4) Transform product content via support for developers, admins, and end users with new paradigms (read AI-driven) for delivering documentation, best practices, and support.
In the next session, Anthony Ponceot gave an agenda for innovation for the 2024 portfolio with six key axes (1) Product Variation (2) User-Oriented Analytics (3) Supplier Management Solutions (4) Rules-Based Forms Modeling (5) Advanced Scalable Visualization, and (6) Low-Code API Management. He showed examples of each of these initiatives demonstrating the way that Aras addresses each of them.
Of particular note was the emphasis on a highly configurable analytics dashboard (above)
and more impressive was the low-code configurability of REST web services for supporting integrations and therefore the Digital Thread.
Raoul Markus of XPLM then gave an overview of Aras integration strategy which expands beyond MCAD and ECAD.
As you can see, they are working on MBD, Palma, Doors, and Ansys Minerva integrations. Each of this is simultaneously available on cloud and on premises with the exact same feature list.
Just before the coffee break, Benjamin Loubet of AVEVA explained to us how AVEVA does business in the Asset Lifecycle arena and why they signed the recent partnership agreement with Aras.
As you see above, Aras will be seen as the Data Management piece of the Asset Lifecycle Management story while AVEVA PI and their other portfolio items will handle Data Aggregation, Data in Context, and Data Sharing.
He also described the partnership as shown above with co-selling and new offerings coming later this year.
As you see above, you can see the objectives they have put for themselves over the next year or so. Unfortunately, the AVEVAWorld conference was being held in parallel to the Aras Connect conference, so there were no folks from AVEVA to talk to and Benjamin had to leave immediately following this presentation, so your humble narrator was unable to get any further details.
Pre-Lunch Presentations: Customer Experiences at Haulotte and Airbus Helicopter
We had a great presentation from David Breneur of Haulotte, a lifting platform manufacturer about how they adopted Aras for their engineering needs.
This turned out to be a fantastic example of a digital thread going from CAD (Solidworks) into the PLM and then to both ERP and MES. The specific example here was calculating Purchased Price in order to enhance the design process because Haulotte only assembles their loaders, they don't manufacture the pieces themselves, so pricing is a key factor in their decision-making process. There will be an upcoming series of posts by me on the Aras website, one of which will go into more details about this interesting project.
Romain Jouannet of CIMPA then described the Technical Study Archival system, or TSAR, project at Airbus Helicopter.
As shown above, Aras Innovator was successfully deployed to replace a host of legacy features and add critical new functionalities for managing the testing of the rotor driver system for a line of helicopters.
It was interesting to see how the flexible Aras data model was used to model testing and studies with a minimizationg of customization and a maximum of configuration in order to sunset the legacy solution with a minimum of disruption for the customer's users.
After Lunch before Coffee Break
We learned from Eric Ledemé of Aras about the new European Digital Passport as part of ISO 59004 and how it will be implemented in Aras.
These DPP are already in place for some products such as batteries as shown above.
As you see above, each of the Aras solutions will be connected to external data sources in order to have access to all the necessary data to ensure that products designed in Aras can fill out all portions of the Digital Product Passport.
He then demonstrated the Substances Management cpaabilities where raw materials can be flagged as recyclable or hazardous as shown above.
He also showed the closed loop process between Aras and Ansys for iterative engineering and analysis based on different materials for resolving a particular Product Engineering use case.
I really appreciated this view of most of the objects in the Aras data model and how they were connected in order to derive most of the elements necessary for documenting sustainability of products by leveraging Aras and "leaving the documents behind".
Inensia's project of deploying Aras at Nicomatic was then described by Stephane Guingard of partner Aficient and Benjamin Simeoni of Nicomatic. The presentation was on project methodology.
I found it impressive that they were able to fully leverage the built-in capabilities of Microsoft Azure's CI/CD toolset in order to manage the end-to-end Agile deployment in a matter of months rather than years.
It was also interesting to see that one of the advantages of going with a cloud-based solution (once the networking issues of accessing the cloud are resolved) is this seamless integration of DevOps into the process allowing for Quick Wins and a fast tracked adoption process.
Before the final coffee break, Taha Elhariri of Aras described their Aras Portal solution for supply chain.
Aras allows users to create a secure portal for suppliers leveraging any object in the Aras data model with access rules in order to customize portals for collaboration down the supply chain.
Built-in to the solution, suppliers are also score based on factors such as pricing in order to make better informed decisions for engineering.
We saw that Compliance and Supplier Onboarding were already implemented and that the roadmap includes sustainability, RFx management as well as Risk Management. Exciting stuff.
Final Sessions: AI and Roundtable
Day 1 ended with a session again from Anthony Ponceot about Aras and AI as well as a roundtable with guests Bruno Trebucq of CGI Consulting and Vincent Boyet of Accenture and Eric Goutouli (EMEA Pre-Sales Director). There is less to share here visually, but the takeaway was that Aras is working towards integrating AI into their solutions and that Digital Thread is a major priority.
I'll just share this show of Anthony talking about the five ways that Aras will begin integrating AI into their solutions:
- First, they will add chat interfaces on their documentation
- Then, they will add some GenAI capabilitiess to their low-code engine for proposing small code changes and tweaks
- They will then try to optimize their interfacing with other applications to leverage AI on the digital thread
- Ultimately, they want to provide insights into product engineering
- and in some distant (or not?) future, perhaps the system will generate its own solutions with a human-in-the-loop for verification.
Needless to say, there was a lively debate on this as well as sustainability during the technical roundtable, but it was in French and there were few visuals so you'll have to use your imagination or reach out via LinkedIn to one of the speakers mentioned above.
Day 2 - Roadmap and Digital Thread
I was only able to attend two sessions on day 2, the first one was a roadmap discussion in which Anthony Ponceot (once again) mentioned the four primary axes where Aras was focusing their efforts into 2025.
Besides the features discussed on Day 1, Anthony said that Requirements as a service was a key new functionality that Aras was focused on.
For each area, he showed a graphic of digital threads and the different inputs and outputs along them where Aras wants to play along the lifecycle. Above is the requirements piece.
Here he focused on Digital Twins which was the focus of the only other presentation I was able to attend (more in a second).
Here Anthony stressed the digital continuity that Aras wants to implement from Systems design to Service design without changing platforms or data models.
Lastly, he reiterated some of the things he mentioned in the Day 1 AI presentation with some suggestions on how they would be moving forward and that the changes were happening so fast that we might see them sooner than we expect.
The last presentation I saw was from Bruno Trebucq of CGI Consulting who participated in the highly animated roundtable at the end of Day 1. He did a fantastic job describing Digital Twins.
He described the Digital Twin Core feature of Aras as a way of building robust integrations in order to link the design context to the operational context.
He had this great visual summarizing the many sources of data required for a nearly complete digital twin that I really appreciated.
I was particularly happy that he mentioned the absolute criticality of Data Governance in achieving results with digital twins. I found this was one of the strongest slides I saw in the conference.
My Summary
In summary, I learned a lot about how Aras has taken the concepts of Digital Twin and Digital Thread and created some very strong value propositions and solutions around them. I appreciated the customer examples and was admittedly frustrated to miss out on the last few presentations due to a previous commitment.
Aras is definitely positioning themselves in an interesting piece of the PLM market where they can integrate nearly any external system either on cloud or on premises for their customers and prospects, and this is not necessarily the case for all of the other PLMs.
They have a good vision of AI, and it will be exciting to see what R&D comes up with to address the various aspects that Anthony talked about.
Once again, thanks to Aras for inviting me and good luck going forward to the Aras team!