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A strategic advantage
Innovation is no longer a luxury in aerospace; it’s a requirement. The industry faces complex product architectures, strict global regulations, disconnected supply chains, and constant pressure to shorten cycle times without compromising safety or traceability. Most legacy PLM systems struggle to keep up. That’s where Aras Innovator® comes in—a robust, adaptable, and continuously upgradeable PLM platform built to handle the challenges of modern aerospace engineering and manufacturing.
Common aerospace PLM challenges
Siloed engineering disciplines
Aerospace products integrate mechanical, electrical, software, and systems engineering. However, these disciplines often operate in isolation, leading to disconnects, delays, and costly rework. The lack of a unified platform hampers collaboration and impedes the development of cohesive, high-quality products.
Legacy systems = Limited flexibility
Many organizations rely on outdated PLM systems not designed for today’s complexity. Customizations make them nearly impossible to upgrade, leading to increased maintenance costs and reduced agility in responding to market changes.
Manual compliance work
Compliance with standards like AS9100, FAA, and EASA is critical in aerospace. Yet, many companies still manually track audits, FAIRs, and FAI/LAI processes, resulting in errors, missing data, and audit panic.
Complex configuration management
Managing variants, serial numbers, and effectivity is a constant struggle without digital control. The inability to effectively manage configurations can lead to production errors and non-compliance.
Disconnected supplier collaboration
Tiered suppliers often operate in email silos, slowing down feedback loops and increasing risk. The lack of integrated supplier collaboration tools hampers visibility and control over the extended supply chain.
How Aras Innovator transforms aerospace PLM
Aras Innovator delivers a highly adaptable, secure, and future-ready platform that empowers aerospace organizations to overcome PLM limitations and adopt a model-based digital thread across the product lifecycle. Here is a deeper look into how Aras transforms aerospace PLM through a broad spectrum of capabilities:
Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) integration
Aras Innovator empowers MBSE by creating a unified authoring environment where SysML models, simulation results, CAD designs, validation reports, and requirements come together in a single ecosystem. This integration facilitates seamless collaboration across disciplines—bridging the gap between systems, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering teams. The platform ensures that design intent is traceable from early functional definitions to final assemblies, fostering complete visibility and accountability. Early-stage simulations of system behaviors further allow organizations to detect issues before physical prototypes, significantly reducing late-stage iterations and accelerating the path to production.
Digital thread enablement
Aras Innovator forms the foundation of a digital backbone, connecting product-related data across engineering, quality, compliance, and maintenance activities. It enables end-to-end traceability, allowing users to follow a requirement or decision through multiple lifecycle stages and product versions. The platform preserves historical context, ensuring every decision and change is documented and reusable, strengthening institutional knowledge. Aras offers bidirectional connections between physical assets and their digital counterparts through its digital twin framework, enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and continuous improvement.
Built-in compliance management
The Aras Innovator® platform enforces governance policies aligned with standards like FAA, EASA, AS9100, and ISO 9001 through automated workflows, digital signoffs, and auditable approval trails. It simplifies complex documentation tasks by auto-generating airworthiness certificates, traceability matrices, and conformity reports. Standards-specific templates accelerate time-to-compliance and reduce the risk of human error, ensuring that products meet regulatory obligations from the outset.
Enhanced change management and impact analysis
Aras Innovator delivers an intelligent change management services that handle the full lifecycle, from identifying a problem to implementing a solution. It supports industry-proven workflows, including Problem Reports, Engineering Change Requests (ECR), Change Orders (ECO), and Change Notices, all routed automatically for review, approval, and execution. One of its standout features is the built-in impact analysis tool. It gives stakeholders a clear view of how proposed changes might affect related parts, documents, suppliers, or tooling before any change is applied. Aras Change Management is built on the CMII model developed by the Institute of Configuration Management.
Advanced configuration, variants, and effectivity
Aras Innovator allows organizations to manage complex product configurations across the entire lifecycle. It supports 150% BOMs (containing all possible configurations), 100% BOMs (as-built), and configuration contexts. Effectivity rules—based on criteria like model, date, serial number, or geography—ensure the right parts are applied at the right time and place. BOMs are dynamically resolved during downstream processes, eliminating manual intervention and costly errors. Aras platform allows you to maintain program-specific contexts for highly regulated industries like aerospace and defence, managing variations by aircraft type or customer contract. The platform supports design of modular platforms with variability management early in the design process—before CAD structures or part numbers even exist. This enables design teams to explore platform options, maximize reuse of shared components, build in strategies for supply chain disruptions, and maintain consistency across all digital representations within the PLM-managed digital thread.
Digital FAIR, FAI, and LAI
Aras Innovator streamlines the entire First Article Inspection (FAI) process by providing complete visibility and control over FAIR (First Article Inspection Report) documentation. It allows you to monitor supplier submissions through real-time dashboards, with built-in alerts and escalation paths to ensure timely compliance. The platform automatically populates structured FAIR documents such as Part Submission Warrants (PSW), dimensional reports, and material test results by pulling data from connected systems—reducing manual entry and ensuring data accuracy.
Integrated APQP, PPAP, and quality control
Aras Innovator brings structure and visibility to quality planning by directly integrating APQP and PPAP processes into your product and supplier workflows. Key quality elements like PFMEAs, control plans, and checklists are linked to specific parts, process steps, and suppliers, ensuring that quality is built into every stage of development. Supplier readiness is tracked against defined quality gates, helping teams ensure that components meet expectations before production. When non-conformances occur, the platform triggers automated workflows with root cause analysis tools for fast and effective resolution. Real-time dashboards provide insight into quality metrics such as defect trends, first-pass yield, and supplier performance, empowering teams to make proactive decisions and drive continuous improvement across the value chain.
Multi-tier secure supplier collaboration
Aras Innovator provides flexible and secure collaboration with suppliers through a dedicated supplier portal or via direct native UI, with controlled access to specific data. Organizations can share only the necessary information, such as BOMs, CAD files, specifications, and PPAP documents, based on role and project requirements. This eliminates the risks of email-based communication and ensures suppliers work with the most current data. Suppliers can participate in workflows, upload deliverables, and quickly respond to tasks. The platform automatically validates supplier submissions to keep everything audit ready. Intellectual property is protected with watermarking, access control by geography or program, and visibility rules tailored to supplier tiers, offering full transparency and security across your supply chain.
Closed-loop quality and CAPA processes
Aras Innovator unifies all core quality processes—deviations, non-conformances (NCRs), CAPAs, audits, and 8D problem-solving—into a single, traceable framework. It enables teams to manage every stage of an issue—from detection to resolution—with complete transparency and accountability. The platform supports structured 8D Quality Analysis, helping teams drive root cause identification, corrective actions, and long-term prevention strategies. Each quality event is tied to potential failure modes and risk profiles, making triggering or updating DFMEAs and PFMEAs easy. A centralized lessons-learned repository that keeps a history of all quality issues, their failures, root causes, and the corrective and preventive actions taken, captures insights for future reuse and data analysis. This closed-loop approach ensures continuous improvement, faster resolution, and stronger compliance across the enterprise.
Integration with enterprise systems (ERP, MES, CRM, MRO)
Aras Innovator is a true digital backbone, enabling deep integration with ERP, MES, CRM, and MRO systems across the enterprise. Engineering BOMs flow directly into ERP systems for procurement and manufacturing, while MES integration ensures process plans, tool readiness, and shop-floor routing are validated in real time. The MRO lifecycle is fully connected, linking digital twins with part replacements, service history, field issues, and warranty claims to provide a complete view of asset performance. Customer feedback captured in CRM is fed directly into the platform’s quality modules, enabling fast, traceable, and closed-loop corrective actions. Aras’s Configurable Web Services (CWS) strengthens these connections—a powerful low-code tool that allows users to define and publish custom REST APIs without any SQL, AML, or coding. Through an intuitive UI, organizations can expose specific subsets of data with fine-grained access control, streamlining integrations and enhancing security while remaining entirely configurable within the Aras Innovator platform.
In-service analytics and predictive maintenance
Using solutions developed by partners, Aras Innovator leverages integrated IoT and telemetry data to continuously monitor asset conditions, wear patterns, and anomalies, delivering actionable insights before failures occur. This live feedback loop feeds into digital twin models, enabling smarter design iterations and optimized mid-life upgrades. Predictive analytics help forecast failures and dynamically adjust maintenance schedules, reducing downtime and extending product life.
Through its partnership with BellaDati, Aras extends digital thread to IoT analytics —automating service workflows, improving S-BOM management, and driving operational efficiency across the entire product lifecycle.
Scalable program and project management
Aras Innovator enables end-to-end visibility and control over both programs and projects by structuring PLM data—such as parts, documents, changes, and quality events—within dedicated program or project contexts. It supports milestone and gate reviews (PDR, CDR, TRR, MRR), seamlessly embedded into PLM workflows to track phase-based progress. Built-in cost tracking captures the financial impact of changes and delays, while risk registers and contingency plans can be directly linked to specific items or tasks. This integrated framework empowers engineering, PMO, and executive teams to align execution with strategic goals, reduce risks, and deliver complex initiatives efficiently.
Upgrade-friendly customization
Most PLM platforms force a trade-off: customize your way to productivity, lose upgradeability, or stay standard and compromise process excellence. Aras Innovator breaks this mold with a unique, model-based architecture that supports deep customization while preserving your ability to upgrade.
Even better, Aras provides free platform upgrades as part of its subscription, ensuring your solution stays current with the latest innovations, performance improvements, and security updates, regardless of how much you’ve customized.
This uniqueness is especially valuable for aerospace organizations that must rapidly adapt to regulatory shifts, integrate legacy systems, and support long program lifecycles.
Unified data model for the entire product lifecycle
Aras Innovator provides a unified data model based on flexible modelling of ItemTypes and relationships, allowing all core domains—such as parts, documents, requirements, suppliers, and changes—to coexist within a single, extensible platform. Instead of siloed modules, Aras platform links these domains through configurable bi-directional relationships, creating traceable, cross-functional connections. This eliminates duplication, ensures consistent data, and provides a reliable source of truth across the product lifecycle. Versioning, change tracking, and context setting allow teams to manage concurrent development while maintaining control over revisions and dependencies.
Technical documentation and publication
Aras Innovator enables dynamic, data-driven creation of technical publications—directly linked to up-to-date PLM data. CAD models automatically feed into service manuals, illustrated part catalogues, and compliance documents, ensuring accuracy with every design change. The platform supports multilingual publishing from a single source, streamlining global localization efforts. Field teams benefit from interactive 3D manuals that connect exploded CAD views to step-by-step service instructions, improving maintenance efficiency and reducing operational errors.
The time for transformation is now!
The aerospace and defense industry operates at the intersection of precision, regulation, and innovation. In a domain where a single oversight can ground entire fleets or delay billion-dollar programs, having the right PLM and digital thread foundations isn’t optional—it’s critical.
The Aras Innovator platform supports the modern aerospace enterprise’s complexity, compliance, and collaboration needs. Its open architecture, robust configuration management, supplier collaboration tools, and lifecycle flexibility uniquely suit this high-stakes industry.
Aras Innovator enables aerospace organizations to:
- Break free from rigid legacy systems
- Respond faster to regulatory changes
- Integrate seamlessly with engineering and manufacturing tools
- Enhance traceability from concept through sustainment
- And accelerate innovation across global supply chains
In an industry facing growing pressures, from sustainability mandates and cost controls to rapid digitalization, Aras Innovator isn’t just another PLM tool. It’s a strategic enabler for digital continuity, engineering excellence, and operational resilience.
Whether you’re a Tier-1 supplier, an OEM, or a government contractor, the need for a future-ready, adaptable, and enterprise-grade PLM platform has never been more critical.
Let’s talk Aerospace PLM
Curious how Aras Innovator can streamline your aerospace PLM challenges? With over 15 years of experience working with Aras and aerospace clients, I’d love to start a conversation. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or comment on the blog below.
