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© 2014 Aras aras.com1

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Resilient PLM

How to make sure your system is upgradeable,your customizations are never lost and your data are never locked in

© 2014 Aras aras.com

Agenda

What is Resilience

Why do we care in PLM

What Aras is doing to deliver Resilient PLM

What you can do Right Now to improve your PLM experience

Goal

Leave this session armed with ideas to discuss with colleagues and motivated to improve your PLM rollout


Why (continue to) Talk about Resilient PLM

“Resilient PLM” idea introduced at ACE 2013

Many, many conversations within the community

Top 3 biggest disappointments with PLM

1. Chose wrong software, can’t configure to meet business requirements

2. Became irrelevant within 3 years (can’t adapt to new requirements)

3. Can’t move the business forward to new IT technology because of PLM

2 + 3 are about clearly resilience


Robust vs. Resilient

Robust: Solid, immobile, strong, un-bending, …

vs.

Resilient: Adaptable, flexible, fault tolerant, Future Proof…

Resilient PLM

Adapts to changing business requirements – “liquid software”

Is tolerant of technology, IT standards and platform version changes

Robust handling of network or hardware failures

Why worry about Resilience?

▫ Preserve investments in customizing, integrating, and training

▫ 20+ year product lifecycles demand long-term PLM continuity


Resilient PLM

What does the Next 10-20 Years look like for your PLM project?

▫ Hardware scalability to support end-user growth

▫ Vault file storage space requirements

▫ What-if more remote sites are added, is the network ready

▫ New functionality, new departments, new workflows,…

▫ Does PLM survive a management change? Acquisition?

▫ What-if if the CAD software is changed? ERP software is changed?

Are we designing and deploying PLM in way that is resilient?

Resilient PLM

Attributes of a 20 year PLM system

Transparent – no hidden meaning or secret decoder ring. If you found a DB and Vault without the software 20 years from now, could you still extract your product structure / data

Evolvable – nothing IT platform specific, because we don’t know what Microsoft, Google, Oracle (and the vendors that don’t exist yet) will be doing 20 years from now

Adaptable – because company processes will surely change in the next 20 years

Aras Resilient PLM

Open▫ Modeling Engine for Easy Adaptability ‘Liquid Software’

▫ Open Architecture /Published API’s / Transparent Data-Model

▫ Customer Data is Stored Non-Encrypted

▫ Subscribers have Source Code

Subscriber Upgrade Guarantee

Self-Documenting System

Company Culture:

▫ No customer left behind

▫ No Customer forced into an expensive upgrade


Aras Resilient PLMReport Card –14 Year PLM System

Aras AML is the resiliency secret sauce. Backward compatible, consistent syntax, change tolerant.

Proof Point: US Army – 14 years with Aras Innovator, 9 major version upgrades, Oracle -> SQL Server migration, Java -> .NET migration, and all the integrations / customizations made in the beginning still just work.

AML queries from 2000 will still run today against the latest version Innovator server.

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Making Your PLM System Resilient

Understand and plan for long term TCO – what is the impact of upgrades and technology stack changes. Most companies do not consider this in their PLM planning.

Choose software from partners committed to resilience.

Document your PLM

Customize in the recommended way



Documentation

▫ What happens when the current PLM team retires, will new IT and new PLM admins understand and still be able to continue maintaining the system

▫ Capture your PLM requirements as use cases with defined test plans

▫ Self-Documenting Innovator – Tuesday Afternoon breakout session



Customization and Upgrade Tips from Aras Support

▫ Stay current. Apply service packs when possible. The more up-to-date your implementation, the less risk of complication and being left behind.

▫ Never stop customizing. Stay current with end-user requests and the business requirements. Lots of small changes that get done instead of a huge backlog that becomes too big to accomplish.

▫ Minimize changes in the Innovator code tree; use top.aras.evalMethod(…) in the tree and keep the Methods in packages (this also makes it possible to change and test code without needing access to the server)




▫ The system is infinitely customizable without changing source code. Learn and use the recommended customizing techniques. Come to training!

“Color Within the Lines”

▫ Before you change source code, talk with Aras Product Management. We may make the change in core so everyone benefits or give you alternate strategies.

▫ Document a test plan to use for in regression testing and use automated testing.




▫ Collect your customizations into Packages and put under version control.

▫ Keep customized Items that are extending solutions in separate Packages that the solution depends on, this makes it clear who ‘owns’ what.




▫ Comments in Method code. Really helps when merging with Aras changes. Comment methods consistently following the Aras dev team practice:

// ++++ customization for company name -----

▫ Don’t make the upgrades more difficult than necessary

Do not use the new version production cutover as the time to switch to new hardware. Too many moving parts increases risk of complications.

Start the upgrade when the system is stable in production. Applying untested changes just before a code freeze increases risk of complications


RIGHTNOW

Plan your PLM deployment

▫ Make Resilience and long-term TCO a PLM software selection criteria

▫ Make Resilience and long-term TCO a team objective

▫ Document, Train and Document

Collaborate with the open PLM Community for ideas

Engage with CIMdata on their research

▫ PLM Investment Sustainability Model



RIGHTNOWA C E 2 0 1 4

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