Cadalyst - January/February 2009 - (Page 40) beyondengineering By Kenneth Wong No-Money-Down PLM Companies on tight budgets can turn to open-source and on-demand solutions for product lifecycle management. ome might consider Marc Lind’s mission to be impossible. As vice-president of marketing for Aras, he’s supposed to come up with “revenue-driven marketing strategies” for the company’s opensource product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, which are downloadable for free. In other words, you can grab the entire Aras suite from the company’s site, install it in your shop, and use it for as long as you want — without ever receiving an invoice. Lind often speaks with pride of the Aras customers who have never paid the company a single dime. So how does he plan to generate revenue? That’s his problem, not yours. Your problem more likely is your budget, a casualty of the unkindest cut, the latest economic woes. You’re not about to entertain a big-ticket item, such as a companywide software implementation that requires multiple years and a small army of consultants. Yet, you can’t help but wonder if someone might accidentally order the wrong part or go into production with the wrong CAD file. If you’re in this position, the software modules from Aras and others might be the antidotes for your headaches. Priced at $0–$200 a month, these products shouldn’t give bean counters a fit. For lack of a better description, let’s call them PLM on a shoestring. S Pigeonholing Small Business? “Many [solution providers] seem to have a simplistic definition of small business, such as less than x number of employees or below x dollars in annual revenues. In a recent survey, we interviewed hundreds of manufacturing companies worldwide. What we found out is, even among companies of similar size and ranking, they have different needs, strategies, and goals, and therefore different adoption. From it, we concluded that in order to segment the market properly, vendors should look at not only size — which is a less important factor — but, more importantly, geography, industry, and PLM maturity.” — Joe Barkai, practice director, PLM strategies, Manufacturing Insights Download Your PLM for Free With Dassault Systemes, Oracle, PTC, SAP, and Siemens PLM Software dominating the headlines, news about other players sometimes gets drowned out and you might not have heard about Aras. “The premise of the company,” said Lind, “is to create the next-generation enterprise PLM solution Aligni that’s both affordable www.aligni.com and scalable. So it could Aras scale down for small www.aras.com businesses but also Arena Solutions scale up for large enterwww.arenasolutions.com prises. It can be installed ImpactPLM on a single machine or www.impactplm.com distributed throughout JOVA a data center.” www.jovasolutions.com Though distributed for Salesforce.com free, Aras’ open-source www.salesforce.com software is by no means Trilogy Design skimpy. The latest verwww.trilogydesign.com sion, Aras Innovator v9, is 40 a 108-MB download that installs a suite that you can use to manage bills of materials (BOMs), change orders, assemblies and parts, activities, schedules, tasks, budget, risk, collaboration, read/write/edit permissions, and much more. The online documentation provides step-by-step instruction about how to set up the web-based system on the Microsoft platform using Windows Server, .NET, and SQL Server. The software is certified by Microsoft. The latest release is marked by the introduction of multilingual support. “That means, if you’re in California, you can be viewing a part in English, but your suppliers in Germany and China who are logged in at the same time can be looking at the same part annotated in German and Chinese,” Lind explained. Open-Source Business Model Aras doesn’t have to charge for its PLM software because the company has a profitable business selling related support, services, and training. For example, the one-day QuickStart package costs $2,000, and a four-day QuickPilot costs $10,000. These packages, Aras explains, will help you get a feel for the PLM system and plan your rollout. You can also purchase support and services as needed. The Aras Unlimited packages (subdivided into Essentials and Premiere editions) start at $750 per month. In addition, Aras University offers classes. Most are one to two days and priced at $500 a day per student with regular sessions in Boston and Munich. Lind points out that the support and services are optional, so if you have the IT skill necessary to configure the software on your own and learn it by consulting the online documentation, you don’t have to purchase anything from Aras. “We www.cadalyst.com cadalyst January/February 2009 http://www.aligni.com http://www.aras.com http://www.arenasolutions.com http://www.impactplm.com http://www.jovasolutions.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.salesforce.com http://www.trilogydesign.com http://www.cadalyst.com
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