English
FrançaisJoin us at a 2026 Aras Connect event near you!
Introduction
Imagine two engineers at different companies. Both companies focus on designing and manufacturing electromechanical products and use an industry-standard PDM (product data management) tool to manage their CAD and other files associated with this process. The main difference between the two engineers is how much time each spends searching for data, as opposed to time spent on actual design engineering work. Without integrating the rest of the software applications inside the enterprise, the first engineer has little control over the data created.
On the other hand, the second engineer can connect all multi-CAD data to a single product lifecycle management (PLM) system without leaving the CAD tool environment. All data is connected through a digital thread and can be instantly shared with the entire organization. This allows the engineer to create designs and share them internally with stakeholders throughout the organization as well as with external suppliers.
Aras Innovator’s multi-CAD PLM integration enables engineers to unlock valuable CAD data for the enterprise and extended enterprise with secure access and permissions while allowing designers to continue working in their familiar CAD tool environment.
When access to CAD data is limited to CAD designers, the only users who can realize the value of visualization, collaboration, and coordinated change based on highly intuitive, graphical representations of the product are the users who created those representations in the first place.
In this white paper, we look at the current CAD and PDM landscapes and outline the impact of an unconnected CAD environment. Then we examine the benefits of CAD PLM integration and the importance of a digital thread that connects that data with departments, the extended enterprise, and the supply chain.
Part 1: Extending Multi-CAD Data to the Enterprise
Getting visual data to users across the enterprise helps companies extend the value of multiCAD data to more teams with more roles and responsibilities, even if they can’t access or use the CAD tools themselves. It also creates a single source of truth for part information that can be connected to various other domains throughout the product’s lifecycle and governed by formal change processes.
But all this functionality still depends on CAD data management. The scenario described above is only possible if the CAD data is connected to all stakeholders through a digital thread.
What is a digital thread?
The digital thread enables full product lifecycle traceability, allowing previously siloed teams across the enterprise to work concurrently with the latest product information.
It creates connections to critical information, tracking a product and its digital assets from concept through design, manufacturing, quality control, and field maintenance.
The digital thread can also become a key enabler in determining what new products and services to provide in a rapidly changing marketplace. It is more than just a way to position your company to manage critical information.
The importance of a digital thread:
The road to digitally transforming engineering & manufacturing
As a business leader, it’s your responsibility to execute the strategic objectives mandated by executive leadership. These may be wrapped in concepts like digital transformation or digitization, but what really keeps everyone up at night is lacking the ability to collaborate effectively.
According to Oliver Wyman’s report, Cutting Product Costs At Their Roots, 25-45% of all costs in engineered products have no value to the customer. These costs are compounded by new workforce models allowing flexibility regarding where teams work. This situation may cause slowdowns in your business and a lack of visibility that, in turn, uncovers disconnected processes and tools, resulting in increased time spent searching for and communicating in the right context needed for effective collaboration.
New requirements for more features and connectivity across all product lines are pressuring the outdated enterprise solutions used to support engineering, manufacturing, and quality. These systems were not built to support connectivity with context across the product lifecycle. This is holding back the collaboration required to develop innovative products that can keep pace with customers’ quickly changing needs.
Is your company among those that have missed the mark on projects targeted to collaboration improvements? More than likely, you have been wasting time and resources by throwing technology at a problem without getting a firm grasp on the fundamental elements required to transform.
These problems can be traced back to the difficulty in collecting and connecting data from disparate sources and processes throughout the organization and deriving useful information and analytics from it.
The digital thread is a fundamental, high-value capability for manufacturers to ready themselves for the next decade of growth. In fact, it should be the first milestone in your transformation journey to increase digitization for innovation and growth.
The importance of moving away from a legacy PDM system
Legacy PDM systems cannot manage today’s product complexity and, more importantly, the product complexity of tomorrow. These systems, originally designed to support specific engineering disciplines, like mechanical, are closed and thus create problems when trying to upgrade or add additional capabilities.
As most design engineers know, the data that makes up a CAD file can be very complex and contain a lot of specific design information—like configurations, manufacturing instructions, bills of materials, and much more. This complexity, combined with how CAD systems manage files, is a continuous challenge for PDM systems.
This is why data management was considered a burden for many years and an onerous activity for designers and engineers. Their workdays were focused only on CAD system work, and many say this is still true today.
But with the growing amount of information, many users have started to ask questions like:
- Where did I save my files?
- Which is the latest revision of my work?
- Who is working on these product files now?
This lack of CAD PLM integration can disrupt the on-time delivery of new products, as complex products contain not just the mechanical and electrical disciplines of engineering but now software. The digital thread is necessary to connect disparate silos of information and manage and understand how to handle changes.
Connecting critical information and understanding when it changes, how it changed, and what it means to the engineer enables a collaborative environment throughout the design process. It does this by removing information silos. Everyone has a view of the information, and therefore users can see the changes in real-time, generating conversations that would otherwise happen after the fact or not at all. This includes the ability to manage and trace information for all product items, a view of how the bill of materials evolves, and mapping the necessary processes to facilitate change management.
Engineers need a system that integrates with all leading CAD tools, with a direct interface with parts libraries and instant access to models for all new parts in all popular formats from several sources.
With CAD PLM integration, designers can access compliant models of every component in all leading CAD formats. Each model can be quality-checked, and part suppliers can be validated and put on the approved manufacturer list.
Once checked and released, the component will be available to the entire community. Users can also fracture a model into logical groups to suit design requirements as necessary.
Either approach provides the following benefits:
- Control costs by providing an overview of approved components only
- Reuse existing library models for future designs to reduce design time
- By connecting to the ECAD library, you can improve your design process, shorten design time, and reduce the need for physical prototypes
- Connect the ECAD library to make sure you have a full picture of all your components
- Synchronize component information with your design files and BOM-structures
- Ensure the accuracy and completeness of your ECAD library
The value of managing CAD with the digital thread
According to Accenture’s, Think thread first: Surf the wave of product data, making product data and its status available to the right people at the right time creates the following operational efficiencies:
20-40%
reduction in costs for data duplication and overlapping toolsets
Up to 5x
the speed of data capture and curation through thread automation
2-3x
data reuse through cross-functional access to data
15-40%
improvement in time to market via enhanced design team coordination
10-50%
reduction in product renovation activities through data-driven design
Transforming into a resilient organization
Digitally transforming into a resilient enterprise ecosystem requires a new way of thinking. Sometimes, this means migrating to a better way of operating, thinking differently about how you deliver complex products, or shifting to new markets. See how others have done this using product data to make the move:
NuScale is taking a new approach to nuclear power. Instead of building reactors on-site, they designed a small modular reactor (SMR) which is built and assembled in a factory and transported to the site for installation. NuScale selected a solution to bring teams together across the product lifecycle to support a continuous digital thread, creating a Digital Twin so that product information can be linked to support customer and compliance requirements.
Kendrion was managing multiple systems across three divisions, one of which was approaching its end of life. To digitally transform, Kendrion sought a single product lifecycle management (PLM) environment to implement a digital thread to achieve traceability throughout the product development process, enabling the mapping of requirements to engineering, increasing the reuse of information, reducing dependency on spreadsheet-based processes, and enhancing the visibility of all product information.
Technip Energies’ digital-by-design approach aims to achieve full project lifecycle traceability and optimization from concept through design, execution, and operations. This collaboration will increase efficiency and create new opportunities in the energy industry. The solution will be a single project platform, leading to standardized data flows and seamless collaboration between disciplines, and easy access to past project information to increase engineering reuse, reduction of cycle time, data integration for actionable reporting, and creation of a digital twin backbone.
Part 2: Why Use CAD PLM Integration for Multi-CAD Management
PLM ensures that CAD designs, parts, and assemblies are maintained in a single source of truth as they change and evolve, with all parties across the lifecycle notified of—and collaborating in—those changes. Also, it helps teams communicate within and across disciplines in clear, visual, and intuitive ways as designs evolve. PLM offers governance for formal change processes, like release management, change orders, requests, and notifications, along with capabilities for collaboration, allowing for the review, markup, and informal change requests by any team involved in the product’s lifecycle.
So how is it done?
The ability to synchronize CAD and PLM data
To synchronize data for management in PLM, a PDM connector provides for the bi-directional mapping of properties, part numbers, and configurations between the PLM and PDM platforms.
Parts and CAD documents are generated in the PLM system, along with part numbers—if the user chooses. But no CAD documents are attached until the user specifies. This creates “placeholders” in the PLM system where documents and related data can be connected, even if there are no CAD designs yet to represent each part. This helps design processes managed in PLM to happen concurrently with those managed in PDM, rather than sequentially until they’re brought together at the right time based on the company’s business processes.
Submit to PLM creates the BOM structure and viewables for collaboration and markup
CAD documents are not attached to their Parts in the PLM system until the user submits them to PLM, which generates a full BOM structure in the PLM system automatically, matching 1:1 with the CAD data structure from the PDM system.
This step also generates viewables. With the viewables created, any user with permissions can leverage the Visual Collaboration feature in the PLM system. Here, with just an internet browser, users can view and rotate the CAD data; explode, measure, cross-section, and select and hide/show parts in the structure; and mark up the 3D model to smoothly and visually collaborate with other users across the enterprise. Visual Collaboration takes a snapshot of the markup state, which can be included in a discussion thread-style user experience where members collaborate with one another by subscribing to notifications and tagging other users in their comments. This powerful visualization plus social collaboration feature lets users throughout the product lifecycle participate in the review and communication of the CAD designs even if they’re not CAD users.
Change state governs changes to CAD
With a request from a team member to change a design, this selection in the PDM ensures that the parts’ state in both the PDM and the PLM system indicates “In Change” so as not to allow other changes across either system. And with the change made, the Submit to PLM function can now ensure that only the changed CAD documents and parts are returned to PLM.
“Add to change” drives PLM changes from the PDM user interface
Users can initiate a formal Change Management process in the PLM system from the PDM user interface by choosing “Add to Change.” This places all items from the CAD structure—both CAD and parts—as affected items on the new change, or the user can select from a list to identify items to add or remove from the change before creating it in PLM. Any change item in the PLM system can be generated here, and its unique item number can be automatically assigned during this step.
With the change generated out of the PDM, a fully featured change management process in the PLM system is available to the user; including workflows with review, approval, and signoff to create a traceable record of the change, plus other processes across the platform that can leverage change items, like quality processes including Problem Reports and CAPAs.
Conclusion: Parts with connections across the platform
Parts generated quickly and automatically from PDM, and CAD data are available to functions and applications well beyond Change Management and Visual Collaboration on the PLM platform.
Parts can relate to requirements and system architecture data to demonstrate how early requirements and system designs are fulfilled by physical designs. They can relate to the simulation instructions, variables, and results used in external authoring tools, to create a traceable record of their use in simulation processes for the enterprise.
They can relate to their Quality Planning (Design Quality) and Quality Management (QMS/CAPA) processes to demonstrate a fully auditable trail of how quality was built-in and managed throughout a product’s design. And they can be used downstream in manufacturing processes, connecting process, quality, and engineering functions into a single, digital information thread.
Released parts even can be transformed into a Physical Parts Bill of Materials, creating a digital record of the physical product in the field that includes its operational lifecycle, configurations, and any changes driven by service or maintenance activities.
Parts and assemblies that originate in CAD can take on a life of their own when they are made accessible to the enterprise on a comprehensive, end-to-end PLM platform throughout their lifecycles, starting as they embark on their design, manufacturing, and operational journeys.
Part 3: Why Consider the Aras CAD PLM Integration Solution?
The existing CAD and PDM solution footprint cannot manage today’s product complexity and, undoubtedly, the product complexity of tomorrow. These systems, originally designed to support specific engineering disciplines, like mechanical, are closed, difficult to adapt, and thus create problems when trying to upgrade or add additional capabilities when you need to pivot.
This inability to integrate across disciplines is disrupting on-time delivery of new product introductions, as complex products contain not just the mechanical and electrical disciplines of engineering, but now software as well.
The Aras PLM solution can associate key documents, projects, and change processes or workflows with those parts, to keep all the data that’s ancillary to the part items organized and consistent as that data changes and evolves throughout the product’s lifecycle as well, alongside changes made to their parts. Finally, a PLM system allows the part and assembly data to relate to data generated by upstream and downstream functions throughout the product lifecycle, like information about requirements, system models, simulation processes and results, quality planning and quality management, manufacturing processes, maintenance procedures, and so much more.
When everyone has a view into information and can be notified when it changes, it accelerates the product development cycle, enabling conversations that otherwise would happen after the fact or not at all. This includes the ability to manage and trace information for all product items, every decision made, and who decided it, and is forever traceable using the digital thread.
Solution: CAD PLM Integration
The Aras Platform is built to adapt to a changing business environment. It is a platform that not only supports ongoing customization but also encourages it. To own the lifecycle and power new digital transformations, manufacturers need a product innovation platform that is open, flexible, scalable, and upgradeable.
The Aras PLM Platform is ready for the cloud, giving global businesses complete control over their PLM investment. Manufacturers can deploy on-premise and migrate to a hybrid or full cloud model without losing solution capabilities. Or they can start in the cloud and move to the data center whenever they want. No matter which option you choose, you get the:
Same solutions. Same subscription. Same benefits.