Aras® today announced that the Schaeffler Group, a global integrated automotive and industrial supplier, has selected the Aras Innovator® platform to support its Engineering Cockpit application. Schaeffler´s Engineering Cockpit provides up to 20,000 users with role-based access to information across multiple disciplines, interfaces, systems, and authoring tools to make better decisions. The collaboration with Schaeffler is the first result of the partnership between Aras and IBM that was announced in December last year.
Digital transformation is one of the key issues at Schaeffler. The Engineering Cockpit application is one of the central tools to connect all disciplines and systems. The Engineering Cockpit is a web-based application allowing direct access to development data for a large number of development centers. It supports the company-wide configuration and change management in the initial phase.
To achieve Schaeffler’s requirements for the Engineering Cockpit and to align with the overall digital transformation strategy, the company was looking for a platform that addresses the business needs on the one hand for flexibility, extensibility and redundancy-free project documentation, and for full support of tasks along the product lifecycle on the other hand.
Schaeffler will use Aras Innovator to improve the following key areas:
- deliver a company-wide solution for the configuration and change management process for the Engineering Change Process in six months
- enable Schaeffler’s data integrity and product configuration control company-wide for the product engineering domain
- efficient management of service requests
- cross-disciplined communication as product data and engineering processes are spread over the whole supplier chain
- overarching project coordination
- management reporting and decision support
- integration with enterprise systems (SAP, PTC Windchill etc.)
With its PLM platform, Aras ensures flexibility to connect the different systems of each discipline within a data-based product development process creating the conditions for the Digital Thread and for integration of the IoT platform. The Aras solution delivers a deep integration between systems engineering and the embedded software development tools (ALM/MBSE) within the Engineering Cockpit product configuration control. Additionally, the solution enables analytics from and with the digital platform focusing on system development metrics initially.
“With Aras, we are entering a new sphere of data integration. At Schaeffler, we want to digitally optimize processes and procedures as well as create new service-oriented processes. The next logical step is a deeper integration of our current systems and the data exchange related to that company-wide,” says Dirk Spindler, Senior Vice President R&D at Schaeffler.
“Our platform integrates current systems and enables Schaeffler to preserve investments. By integration we are able to deliver access to all disciplines and processes of the Business of Engineering as well as a configuration and change management,”, says Peter Schroer, Founder and CEO of Aras. “Aras is proud to support, in cooperation with IBM, one of the largest automotive suppliers’ digital agenda.”
