Customer Story

How an Industrial Machinery Manufacturer Unified Disparate PLM

“We made a really detailed choice between different…PLM systems, and we decided to continue PLM development based on the Aras PLM.”

SENIOR IT PROJECT MANAGER
Customer Story – Industrial Automotive
Size
10,000+ employees
Industry
Industrial & Automotive

Challenges

  • Disparate, legacy PLM systems: Numerous mergers and acquisitions resulted in disconnected, legacy PLM systems and processes across the company’s international business units, challenging collaboration and innovation.
  • Inefficient development and production: Legacy, siloed PLM systems required manual, time-consuming spreadsheet-based processes, causing production slowdowns, inefficient logistics, unnecessary costs, and a disconnect between the company’s business units.
  • Poor traceability: Global teams faced challenges accessing the same accurate, up-to-date versions of product data in real time.
  • Lack of scalability: The company was growing fast, and its production and manufacturing requirements were changing quickly, but its existing PLM was not scalable.

Outcomes

  • Improved PLM for global teams: The team successfully deployed essential PLM features such as documentation management, a parts bill of materials (BOM), and a DevOps toolkit for building and testing custom PLM integrations, helping globally dispersed teams collaborate better.
  • Unified PLM use cases: Implementing custom, modular PLM features that aligned with business-specific “user stories” improved collaboration between global business units, streamlining production and manufacturing processes across the organization.
  • Improved traceability: Integration between the PLM and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), along with data mapping between existing PLM systems and Aras, established a single source of truth that has been successfully deployed to over 20 sites worldwide.
  • Scalable, more accessible PLM: The company’s PLM solution is now hosted in the cloud, improving security, scalability, and resilience for the globally dispersed company.

Explore This Story

    Disparate product lifecycle management (PLM) processes created a siloed, inefficient system at an international industrial and automotive company. To streamline operations between automotive plants worldwide, the company implemented a unified, digital thread backbone with Aras Innovator SaaS to serve as a single source of truth for data from more than 20 sites worldwide.

    A leading Dutch provider of electromagnetic systems and components expanded dramatically over the past two decades, with ten mergers and a growing presence in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. However, the company realized its global plants were disconnected due to the lack of centralized, global product lifecycle management (PLM).

    Pain Points

    Each of the company’s global plants had its own PLM system and processes, making it difficult for them to collaborate and innovate. In addition, these legacy systems required lots of hands-on time from the company’s teams, including many manual, spreadsheet-based processes. These separated, outdated systems led to production delays, inefficient logistics, siloed product development, and unnecessary manufacturing and aftermarket costs.

    The company recognized that the best way to integrate these siloed processes was to implement a centralized, global PLM system in the cloud. This would preserve the integrity of product data by offering consistent traceability. This data also needed to reflect changes in real time so that every plant could access the same information.

    “It is really important, not only for R&D centers and for plants, to have up-to-date information about our products, but also all other departments: marketing, sales, logistics, and global quality. All the departments should have the same view and the same picture of our developing products so we can provide valuable information about our product to our customers.”

    SENIOR IT PROJECT MANAGER

    PLM Requirements

    While searching for a PLM solution, the team wanted to adopt a platform that offered:

    • Consistent product data and traceability
    • Accurate, real-time data accessible to plants around the globe
    • Easy integration with other systems
    • Scalability for powering growth over time
    • A flexible, cloud-hosted system that can adapt quickly to changing requirements

    Due to the company’s existing and predicted continued growth, the team also wanted a scalable, flexible platform that could quickly adapt to changing requirements and easily interface with other existing manufacturing platforms. The team believed a cloud-based platform would best fit these scalability requirements.

    Successes with Aras Innovator

    The company recognized the need to transform dozens of unique product lifecycle processes into a single, integrated system. This transformation would require custom features, not just out-of-the-box (OOTB) modules. As a result, the team chose to deploy Aras Innovator SaaS, as it offers the same functionality and customization capabilities as Aras on-prem but with the added scalability and resiliency of the cloud.

    In addition, because it is cloud-hosted on Microsoft Azure, Aras Innovator SaaS can be easily accessed by globally dispersed organizations like this industrial and automotive manufacturer. Their team also appreciated the level of compliance and security offered by the Aras and Microsoft partnership.

    The Aras implementation team worked closely with the team from the start, helping them define and deploy a minimum viable product (MVP) rollout in 2021. This pilot program included essential features such as document management, CAD, a parts bill of materials, and downstream system integration. The team also relied on Aras DevOps, a toolkit included in Aras Innovator SaaS, which enabled them to use agile CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) processes for building and testing custom integrations across the PLM environment.

    Results: More use case definitions and unified business processes

    The following year, the industrial and automotive company began to define more specific use cases, known as “user stories,” in its new PLM system. Because of Aras’ cloud-based customization options, the team was able to identify and execute these practical use cases — finding commonalities between business groups and creating features that unified the needs of business units globally. Altogether, they defined over 150 user stories. The company also developed a PLM-ERP interface and created data mapping between the existing PLM systems and Aras Innovator SaaS.

    “Today, key users from over 20 sites worldwide can find common ground in a centralized source of truth and tap into powerful features that align with their everyday needs.”

    SENIOR IT PROJECT MANAGER

    The team continues to roll out the new PLM solution, aiming to implement this digital thread backbone with all business units. They will also keep testing and refining Aras features using Aras DevOps to further align with the organization’s needs.