2025 Summer Reading: Author’s Choice!

It’s that time of year! As you head off on your summer vacation, here is a collection of our favorite blogs to add to your summer reading list. You’ll notice a common theme – this year’s list is what we are calling Author’s Choice, and we’re asking some of our authors to select a blog or two they’d like to share with you, and why!

This approach applies the power of the Aras community, in this case, our community of Aras Blog authors, to share insights, ideas, and impactful takeaways with all of you. Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Bruce Bookbinder
Navigating Complexity and Compliance in the Process Industries

This blog is a must-read for professionals navigating product complexity and compliance in process industries. It offers insightful parallels between expanding universes and evolving digital threads. Highlighting real-world failures in aerospace and food manufacturing underscores the critical need for dynamic, traceable, and adaptable digital thread strategies supported by modern PLM systems.

Paweł Chądzyński
Exposing Data in Context: Enhancing Decision-Making with Digital Threads

Much is said and written about the need to change the view of PLM from an IT-managed platform for engineers to a strategic business initiative discussed at the Board level. This approach allows us to expose and measure the true value of digital transformation for the enterprise. Your digital thread strategy is key to that way of thinking, but only if you can identify the “larger” underlying issues that help to improve decision-making and the value of processes. This blog dives right into that.

Josh Epstein
Connected Intelligence: Turning Possibilities into Competitive Advantage

We’re living in an interesting time – surrounded by vast amounts of data and powerful AI solutions. But turning that potential into AI-enabled applications takes more than just tools; it requires what-if thinking and a deep sense of curiosity. What if we looked at the problem differently? What if we could reimagine what’s possible? These kinds of questions spark innovation, encourage us to embrace complexity, and drive us to create solutions that meet the evolving demands of an AI-powered world.

Marilyn Guisbond
What if Your Digital Thread Was Complete?

This blog draws inspiration from our CTO, Rob McAveney’s keynote at ACE 2025, where he explored the transformative potential of What-If thinking. In this post by Jason Kaspar, he applies that curiosity to the digital thread: What if every stakeholder—designers, engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, service teams, and users—had instant, seamless access to the right product’s lifecycle data at the right time by leveraging an enterprise-wide integrated digital thread?

Jason Kasper
Stronger Together: How Aras is Powering the Future with Partner-Led Innovation

I selected this blog because it highlights a critical pillar of our strategy: the power of community and collaboration. Our investment in Aras partners reinforces our commitment to the ecosystem and accelerates innovation across industries. By enabling partner-led solutions through the Aras Marketplace, we’re not just expanding capabilities—we’re creating exponential value for our customers and unlocking new opportunities for digital transformation. This piece is a great reflection of how we’re growing stronger together.

Kylie Ochab
25 Years of Innovation with Aras

I picked the 25th anniversary blog because it was such a meaningful celebration of how far Aras has come. After missing the chance to fully recognize our 20th due to the pandemic, marking 25 years, especially alongside ACE 2025 in Boston, felt even more special. I loved seeing the memories shared by longtime employees and looking through old photos for the social series we did to acknowledge this milestone. Having spent only 8 of those 25 years here myself, it’s been fun to reflect on the journey and see how much we’ve grown.

AJ Sebastian, Aras Labs
The Real MVPs of ACE 2025: Our Community

This blog reflects how important our community is to us here at Aras. We are lucky to have many dedicated users and builders who enjoy using the platform and sharing their work with the community. If you are interested in joining our builders community, please head to our forums to participate in discussions and watch for announcements about future community-driven events.

Calling Methods via Configurable Web Services

This blog by Chris Gillis is the latest in our series on using Configurable Web Services. It explains how you can execute custom logic inside Aras Innovator® that you can trigger from your external system. Look at the blog to learn more about Configurable Web Services and how we’ll approach similar problems with Aras Innovator Edge in the future.

Patrick Willemsen
Building a Greener Future with Digital Product Passports

Don’t we all want to live in a clean, healthy, green environment? I want to spotlight this blog to encourage you to think about how the digital thread and PLM can help your organization design and manufacture more sustainable products to make and keep our planet pure, fit, and environmentally conscious. Successfully implementing DPPs demands a strategic, cross-functional approach that connects people, processes, and data across the entire product lifecycle. It also gives you a competitive advantage.

We hope this summer reading list provides helpful information and good reads. Please let us know in the comments what you’d like to see next for a blog roundup. In the meantime, if you’re looking for more, check out last year’s recap: Aras 2024 AI Blog Roundup.