Much of the functionality available within Aras Innovator is broken up between our many applications. To better establish what is packaged with each application, we’ll be doing a series of blogs containing instructions for installing each application as well as what you can expect once you’ve installed the application. We’ll be going over the very basics of what each application is capable of. The first installment is about the Product Enginering application, as it comes standard with our out-of-the-box installation.

Our Product Engineering application is the foundation for all of the applications across the platform, to ensure that every process you implement within Aras PLM has visibility to and connections with your part, Bill of Materials, and Engineering Change information. It enables a single platform for the end-to-end lifecycle processes involved in product design, development, manufacture, and maintenance.

 Product Engineering (PE) is probably what you think of when you think of PLM. It allows for the cataloguing of parts and Bills of Materials, associating CAD documents with their identifying information like BoM structure, Parts numbers, manufacturers / suppliers, documentation, versioning, permissions, and more.

. On top of this, PE enables change management, allowing you to keep proper versioning on your parts and assemblies. This can be achieved through many different mechanisms, with the primary one being Engineering Change Orders.

Newer versions of PE also have built-in ways to enable Effectivity within your BOM Structures, enabling for overloaded or 150% BOMs. Take a look at our recent blog post to learn more about how you can leverage this feature.

 

Installing the Latest Version

While PE does come standard with newer Service Packs of Aras Innovator, we are constantly working to improve and bring new features to the application. If you’re ever using an older version of the application and wish to upgrade, here are the steps you’ll take.

 

First you’ll need to download Aras Update. Aras update makes it easy to install our applications without having to manually perform imports or code tree changes. You can download it here. Once you’ve downloaded and opened it, you should see a list of applications you can download and install. For this blog I’m going to download and install PE 12R3, the latest released version of Product Engineering. Once you’ve downloaded the package locally, press install and you’ll be prompted for some information. For our default installation of innovator, here is what your screen should look like.

 

Once you’ve filled in the correct information, press install and within a few minutes you should receive a successful result message. You can then log into your instance of innovator and utilize the new functionality. If you ever want to verify which version of an application is installed, that information is stored in a system variable. You can check it by going to administration > variables on the TOC. Here's what mine look like:

 Conclusion

Let us know what you think of our new series! Are there any applications you’d like an overview of? We plan on covering all applications, but are flexible in the order. Let us know how your company utilizes some of the recent additions to PE in the comments below.

Related:
Aras Labs