The stakes are high in today’s product development landscape. Manufacturers need more than legacy PLM – they need intelligent, connected platforms to keep up with evolving markets, regulations, and customer demands. That’s exactly why Forrester’s PLM Wave matters – and why we’re proud that Aras has been named a Leader in its latest evaluation.

Forrester conducted a rigorous evaluation of select vendors using a common set of criteria, grouped into three high-level categories, including current offering, strategy, and customer feedback. Below, we’ve highlighted a selection of the criteria where Aras received the highest possible scores, explaining how Forrester evaluates each one and how Aras Innovator delivers differentiated, modern PLM capabilities in response.

According to the Forrester report, “Aras’ vision is to empower a community of innovators with a data-driven and AI-enabled approach to PLM. It demonstrates above-par adoption compared with other vendors in our evaluation, with its focus on customer service yielding net revenue retention in excess of 110%.”

Traceability

  • Evaluation criteria: Ability to trace from requirements to design features, test cycles, and certification.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras Innovator® provides full traceability across the product lifecycle by creating a unified digital thread that connects requirements to design, verification, compliance, and certification. Robust relationships between digital thread elements have a lifecycle and provide semantic meaning, bidirectional traceability, configuration behaviors, and event handling. With Aras InnovatorEdge, traceability extends beyond enterprise boundaries. This enables a digital thread solution that can span organizational boundaries and eliminate barriers between systems. Built-in support for certification needs and compliance requirements ensures confidence across regulated industries.

Ideation and Requirements Management

  • Evaluation criteria: How effectively the platform captures requirements to initiate new product design and how it leverages new technologies such as GenAI.
  • Aras’ approach: Requirements are captured and organized within a systems engineering model using Aras Systems Architecture, providing a holistic view of all requirements tied to functions, logical elements, and physical components. This structured approach forms a foundational digital thread to support new product design. Because not all requirements will be authored in Aras Requirements Engineering, InnovatorEdge connects to external sources, enabling full digital thread connectivity. It also monitors third-party data, such as regulatory requirements, for changes that could impact designs. GenAI enhances this process by converting unstructured requirements documents into structured data, aligning content to style guides, and identifying duplicates through similarity analysis. It also suggests new relationships between requirements and other elements to enrich the digital thread.

Value Network / Sourcing Intelligence Integration

  • Evaluation criteria: Support for design-for-availability, alternate sourcing, and use of certified components amid supply chain constraints.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras Innovator’s Component Engineering application gives real-time access to nearly one billion electronic and electromechanical components, supporting informed design-for-availability decisions. Proper management of the Approved Manufacturer List (AML) for each sourced part is crucial to understanding the big picture of component availability. Aras’ Systems Architecture application links requirements to functional and logical system breakdowns. Specialty generative engineering solutions can also be integrated to propose alternate designs. With InnovatorEdge, external sources add context, while events like geopolitical shifts or material shortages can trigger automated reassessments. Aras Innovator provides the digital thread foundation to monitor supply chains, shift suppliers, and adapt designs, ensuring resilience through systems-driven decisions.

Part or subassembly reuse and support for CTO

  • Evaluation criteria: How the solution promotes the reuse of previously engineered parts or subassemblies in CTO manufacturing.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras Innovator combines traditional PLM practices, systems engineering, variant management, and embedded AI capabilities to drive efficiency and reduce redundancy. The platform supports part reuse by enabling shared components across assemblies and configurations. At the same time, Aras Requirements Engineering and integrated systems engineering capabilities help identify and validate compatible parts based on performance, compliance, and interface needs. Variant Management supports configure-to-order by streamlining subassembly reuse across product variants, minimizing duplication, and accelerating delivery. To further optimize reuse, Aras is actively developing agentic AI solutions to analyze prior BOMs to surface commonalities and design opportunities – delivering a comprehensive, intelligent approach to part reuse and cost efficiency.

Sourcing

  • Evaluation criteria: How the platform supports sourcing of standard components and redesign using alternate sources/materials under constraints.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras Innovator’s Component Engineering application delivers real-time access to accurate manufacturer part data, helping teams manage sourcing, end-of-life changes, and counterfeit risks. For redesigns or alternative sourcing, Aras’ Supplier Management Solutions maintains vendor and approved manufacturer lists, while itsit’s Systems Architecture application maps component dependencies to guide smarter material and supplier decisions. Across strategic and tactical levels, Aras supports multi-tier supply chain planning with a tool-agnostic digital thread. Compliance and traceability are built in from engineering to manufacturing to as-maintained BOMs, ensuring resilient, adaptable product design.

Bill of Process

  • Evaluation criteria: How the platform manages routings and manufacturing processes across facilities and simulates cross-domain workflows.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras Innovator’s Manufacturing Process Planning application streamlines the transition from eBOM to mBOM with live reconciliation indicators and a unified environment for authoring Bills of Process and shop floor-ready work instructions synchronized with the MBOM. Processes can be standardized globally or tailored locally, with governance controls ensuring consistent plan distribution across facilities. Aras Innovator integrates with third-party tools for cross-domain simulation and analytics and connects via InnovatorEdge to the Microsoft Manufacturing Cloud, enabling real-time insights, advanced analytics, and AI-driven decision-making on the factory floor.

Adoption

  • Evaluation criteria: Metrics and strategies around customer retention, adoption of product suites, upgrades, and customer success model support.
  • Aras’ approach: Aras drives adoption through product flexibility, proven services, and strong customer success programs. Our freemium offering simplifies trials and pilots, allowing organizations to experience the platform’s capabilities, fostering stakeholder alignment and broader adoption. With rapid implementation and a flexible platform, customers expand to new users and use cases without re-architecting or re-licensing. The Aras Marketplace accelerates time to value with certified, ready-to-use apps and solutions.

Being named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Product Lifecycle Management Platforms For Discrete Manufacturers, Q3 2025, validates our commitment to building a flexible, AI-powered, and highly scalable platform that adapts to manufacturers’ evolving needs. It also validates the impact our customers are seeing across digital thread connectivity, product innovation, and operational resilience.

We’re proud of the entire Aras team for this achievement. We look forward to supporting our customers as they extend the digital thread, build AI into their product development processes, and drive innovation across the product lifecycle.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .

 

 

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