Meet the Builders Behind the ACE 2025 Innovation Challenge
Every year, I leave ACE inspired by the Aras community's enthusiasm for problem-solving and openness to sharing solutions. This year's event was one that will stand out in my memory for a long time though. We had a mind-blowing keynote from CERN (yes, that CERN), an amazing turnout for the Tech Summit with six community demos, and the first-ever Aras Innovation Challenge on the main stage! Inspired by hackathons and the traditional "rapid-fire demos" at ACE, the Innovation Challenge provided community members an opportunity to show off the creative and impactful solutions they're building on the Aras Innovator® platform. Participants submitted projects in one of three topic areas: real-time shop floor data, digital thread, or sustainability. And of course, no competition would be complete without some stakes. Participants competed for a speaking slot on the main stage in Boston, complimentary ACE registrations, a joint workshop with Aras, and glory (that is, to get their name etched on the Innovation Challenge hammer, the "Stanley Cup" of the Aras Community). Meet the finalists Four finalists presented their solutions to a bustling crowd of more than 250 attendees at the end of the first conference day. Yogesh & Vilas AI Advisor for Engineering Design Yogesh Kulkarni and Vilas Sarangdhar from TCS presented an AI-powered solution that facilitates the import of unstructured data into Aras Innovator. The tool processes engineering drawings, extracts data characteristics, and creates corresponding item structures. Tom Smith Enhancing Shop Floor Feedback with Aras & LLMs Tom from SMC developed a solution to collect and analyze shop floor feedback. The solution uses AI to categorize and summarize input to help teams consume and respond to feedback. Konrad Golińczak Document Comparison Tool At Demant, Konrad built a solution that compares versions of Word documents in Aras Innovator. The tool uses AI to make intelligent comparisons and summarize the differences, helping users quickly understand changes. Gilbert Delabrousse Aras Lite MES: Streamlined Shop Floor Management Gilbert at Inensia shared a lightweight manufacturing execution system (MES) built on Aras Innovator. The solution helps operators follow and log work instructions while managers monitor assembly line status in real time. And the winner is... After each finalist made the case for their solution on the main stage, the audience voted for their favorite solution. The next day our CEO, Roque Martin, announced the community's choice at the "Aras in the Round" session. Congrats to Tom Smith, the first winner of the Aras Innovation Challenge! Missed the session or want to learn more about Tom's solution? I was curious about how he chose the topic and how he implemented it, so I followed up with him after the event to chat about it. Why shop floor data? Tom's a senior integration engineer at SMC, one of the largest pneumatics manufacturers in the world, so it's no surprise that he was drawn to the real-time shop floor data theme. The opening moments of his presentation made it clear that some shop floor challenges aren't exclusive to manufacturing spaces though: "Every manufacturing environment thrives on continuous improvement, but collecting and making sense of real-world shop floor feedback can be a challenge. Imagine you're on the shop floor in a manufacturing environment, and you have an idea. Where does that feedback go? Do you write it on a sticky note and put it on your manager's monitor? Or maybe you write it up in an email that gets buried in with a thousand other emails. Or worse, maybe it goes nowhere at all." Who can't relate to the experience of having an idea, but no idea what to do with it? Where to start? Tom's solution addresses three common challenges teams face when improving shop floor operations. 1. Feedback collection Shop floor feedback is often recorded manually, leading to delayed responses or lost ideas. Tom addresses this pain point with a super simple form, making it easy for users to submit feedback. 2. Categorization When feedback is reported, it's typically unstructured, which makes it hard to interpret and act on. Tom's solution makes it easier for teams to search and filter by using AI to categorize input. 3. Summarization AI also helps Tom summarize and recommend actions based on the feedback. These insights are delivered via weekly email, ensuring feedback is shared in an easily digestible format. This strategy enables faster issue resolution, supports data-driven decision-making, improves team communication, and ultimately aligns stakeholders around continuous improvement. How does it work? Tom's solution begins in Aras Innovator, where he created an ItemType to store all the shop floor feedback. To collect the input, he built a lightweight web form with three simple fields: Employee ID, Job ID, and Description. The submit button sends the form data to Aras Innovator via the OData REST API. Next, an onAfterAdd server event sends the description to a large language model (LLM) for categorization. Tom uses Ollama 3.2 LLM, which is open-source and runs locally to ensure that no sensitive data leaves the company's systems. The code prompts the model to categorize feedback into three key areas: Cost, Delivery, and Quality. The server method updates the feedback item's category property with the result. To close the loop, Tom uses the Aras scheduling service to trigger a weekly server method that uses the LLM to summarize the latest feedback and suggest actionable tasks. The method then emails the insights directly to managers. Takeaways Tom's solution demonstrates that leveraging AI in PLM doesn't need to be a "big bang" effort to have a tangible impact on the business. I think the key is identifying the right opportunity and using AI as a tool rather than the whole solution. By letting the LLM handle the tasks it does best (like categorization and summarization) and keeping the rest of the implementation simple, you can quickly deliver a valuable solution that's ready to iterate and improve. What do you think? Could you incorporate LLMs, generative AI, or machine learning in your future Aras projects? Are you already doing something similar today? Let us know in the comments below! Thanks again to Tom and all of the Innovation Challenge finalists. Thank you for reading along and supporting your fellow builders!
The Real MVPs of ACE 2025? Our Community
This year’s Aras Community Event (ACE) was held in Aras’ hometown of Boston. The week kicked off with the Aras Tech Summit, an all-day event focused on our incredible developer community. It’s my favorite part of the event, and other developers seem to agree. This was our first open-invite Tech Summit, where anyone attending ACE could join. With 70 registrants, having so many knowledgeable developers in one room was incredible. We started the day with introductions, and participants shared what they wanted out of the day. The overwhelming majority were interested in seeing what other developers were doing with Aras Innovator®. Coming in as a close second was AI capabilities. With the rest of the morning dedicated to community demos, attendees were presented with new ideas, strategies, and applications developed by other users. Some demos highlighted how fully custom clients use Aras and DevOps solutions specifically created for developers. And of course, there were some AI-related demos as well. These demonstrations launched discussions, and the presenters were able to share some of the more interesting things they’ve done with our platform. It’s great being in a room full of people who like to talk about the nitty-gritty of Aras Innovator. Afternoon sessions included community updates from our new Senior Manager of Developer Relations, Eli Donahue. Eli’s new role and the return of Chris Gillis to the Aras Labs team mean great things for the Aras community. More resources mean more time for blogs, forum posts, and Community Projects. Keep your eyes out for some more exciting announcements in the coming months. After the community update, there were lab demos primarily focused on AI. The community response to these demonstrations was exciting, and we’re working on figuring out the best way to share these projects going forward. The day wrapped up with some open forum discussions. Topics included potential use cases for Aras InnovatorEdge, customizations to the Aras platform, and sharing potential developer pain points. It was a full day of discussions and talking shop. Luckily, it was followed by the Aras welcome reception, which spiced up the event with some great food and conversation. Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s ACE Tech Summit, especially those who presented. These community events are stimulating and wouldn’t be possible without all of you. Looking forward, we have a few options for those who couldn’t join us in Boston. In the fall, we will have our second annual Virtual Tech Summit, a shorter online version of the full event. Watch out for future announcements. If you’re in Europe, I highly recommend attending our ACE Connect events, each with its own Tech Summit. I could not recommend these events more highly to a developer interested in Aras Innovator. The first Aras Connect will occur in Japan in June. It will be followed by Aras Connect events in France, Germany, the UK, and the Nordics in fall 2025. We would love to hear your feedback. Feel free to comment on this blog post or contact me for further conversation.Experience the Power of Community at the ACE 2025 Tech Summit
It’s that time of year again! Our annual Aras Community Event (ACE) is right around the corner. This year the event is taking place near Aras’ hometown of Boston from March 31 to April 3. This year’s ACE is special as it marks the 25th anniversary of Aras as a company. The event is shaping up to be one of our best yet, with tons of great presentations and breakout sessions for everyone. Like most who have attended it, the Tech Summit is my favorite part of the event. It will be on Monday, March 31. In previous years, it was invite-only. This year, we're opening it up to the entire community, welcoming anyone who wants to participate. We hope to bring in some new technical voices who might not have participated in the past. Email Beth Ewing after completing your ACE registration to register for the Tech Summit. The session lasts most of the day and allows the Aras Innovator® tech community to get together and discuss all things Innovator. In the past, we’ve covered everything from new features to best practices, and even explored ways to enhance the product based on feedback from users like you. The Tech Summit provides a space to hear how our partners and customers are using Aras Innovator. This year we’ll have presentations from customers and partners, in which they will share some of the interesting modifications they’ve made to our platform. Community presenters will: Show capabilities they built in Aras Innovator and discuss how they did it (ex: Impact Matrix extensions, pervasive search) Demo the tools they use to manage their Aras Innovator development projects Share how the next generation of engineers are building PLM skills and knowledge with Aras Between Aras presentations, customer showcases, and open discussion, the Tech Summit is a favorite part of the ACE experience. (It certainly was my favorite part of last year’s event!) The summit will be followed by a welcome reception, and the following days are filled with interesting sessions to attend. If any of the above topics are interesting to you or someone you know who is attending ACE, register now to save your place! Here's a quick breakdown of the Tech-Summit agenda: Welcome & Introductions - get to know the attendees and presenters Community Demos - community members show off what they've built and share their knowledge AI Spotlight - AI demos and insights from Aras Lab Lunch Community Update - what's new and what's coming Open Forum Discussions - bring your questions and ideas! This session is all about connecting with your fellow Builders and learning from the group's collective experience. I’m looking forward to ACE this year and to meeting some of you there. Please feel free to reach out if you have questions regarding this year’s Tech Summit or want to get involved. To secure your spot for the Tech Summit, email Beth Ewing after completing your ACE registration. Registration is open right up to the event, but I’d recommend locking in your registration and hotel as soon as possible!
Calling Methods via Configurable Web Services
In previous blog posts, we’ve covered how to set up a Configurable Web Service (CWS) within Aras Innovator®. In this post, we will cover a way to extend the functionality of a CWS endpoint by calling a server method. Creating our Method To start, we will need to create the server Method that will be called via our CWS endpoint. In this example, we will be creating a new endpoint for registering Alternate parts. If a user passes in a Part Number for a part, and a Part Number for an alternate part, this method will create a Part Alternate relationship between the two. Log in as an admin Navigate to TOC -> Administration -> Methods Create a new method with the method code below gist.github.com/christophersgillis/f25bfd73feb7148715a44d72ac01e880 Save and close the Method Note that at the start of this method we are retrieving two properties: the base_part_number and an alternate_part_number. When we make our web service below, we will configure the method endpoint to accept these two parameters. Defining our CWS Web Service Now that we have our Method defined, we can configure our CWS service such that we can call this Method from it. Log in as an admin Navigate to TOC -> Administration -> External Access -> Web Services Create a new CWS web service Title: Parts Management Endpoint Name: PartsManagement Click save and now configure a new endpoint related to this web service Instead of clicking Add ItemTypes as you might have done following our previous blogs, click Add Global Methods Search for and select the method we created above The Alias here will determine what the actual URL will be, so set the Alias to AddPartAlternate We’ll also add two parameters to match what the method is expecting: the base_part_number and alternate_part_number Save both the endpoint and the web service and open Postman for testing Calling our Method With Postman open, we can set up the sample call we will be using to test our new Method endpoint. If you’ve been following along, your request should look something like the screenshot below. Note that because this is a Method endpoint, the request type should always be POST. After configuring the Authorization for the request (either using an API Key or authenticating via OAuth), we should be able to click send and see that our Part Alternate was successfully added! This is just one example of the ways that we can leverage server methods to make our CWS endpoints even more valuable. Let us know if there are any business needs that this functionality would be useful to address. We hope you will be joining us at this year’s ACE Tech Summit March 31, 2025 from 9:00 AM – 4:30, followed by a reception. Details and registration information may be found here.Requirements Engineering and Variant Management Updates in Release 33
The recent rollout of Aras Innovator® Release 33 included upgrades to some of our existing applications. Our goal is to improve the user experience for Aras's Variant Management and Requirements Engineering applications. Let’s take a look at what’s new in Release 33. Variant Management In our newest release of Variant Management, we’ve introduced the concept of Configurator Context. Since products are always evolving, Configurator Context captures the applicable features, options, and rules for specific scopes of work, streamlining the concurrent management of past, present, and future product designs. When resolving Variability Items, you can now select a specific Context to automatically resolve particular features and options based on the selected context: In this example, the RP Series 2024 robot arm is specifically for Palletizing; no other valid options exist, so none are displayed. This is also visualized more clearly in the Configurator Context ItemType within the Variability Structure Tree Grid View. Here you can see that for the same RP Series Robot Arm, we can quickly see which options for each feature applies to the given context: And these can be set directly for each context within the Context Editor tab, shown below: Requirements Engineering In addition to the upgrade to Variant Management, there is also a new version of the Requirements Engineering document. This brings the Requirement Document Itemtype more in line with our standard Technical Document Framework. This comes with multiple benefits and the ability to better customize your Requirement Documents to fit your needs. Let’s take a look at the changes. The Technical Documentation Framework is a flexible and powerful tool for customizing documents and creating powerful links between items. We’ve written blogs on how you can modify your technical documents to contain new content, and those should still function as expected with the new version of RE. The main difference you’ll notice between the old Requirement Documents and the upgraded version is in the amount of options you have for authoring your Requirements. Many of the standard Tech Doc elements are now at your disposal. These can be inserted directly into your individual requirements, which can then be embedded in your Requirement documents. Formatting and spacing should be preserved when embedding. Here’s a quick example of what a more complete Requirement document would look like: As you can see, each requirement has sub-components which can be individually modified. Try experimenting with all the new components available for more powerful and relevant Requirements Documents. That was a quick overview of some of the big upgrades to applications in Release 33. Applications like Manufacturing Process Planning and Enterprise Search were also changed for compatibility and other minor improvements. There are exciting things coming down the pipeline, and there are great reasons to be on recent releases of Aras Innovator. To learn more, consider registering for our annual Aras Community Event (ACE), March 31 – April 3, 2025 in Boston! We hope to see you there.Key Takeaways from Our Inaugural Aras Virtual Tech Summit
On September 19, 2024, we held our first-ever Aras Virtual Tech Summit. Our Tech Summit is something we’ve done at our annual Aras Community Event (ACE) conference for many years. It’s an incredible opportunity to chat with members of our technical community; you can read about my experience at ACE 2024 here. This week’s virtual summit was designed to be similar to our in-person event while being accessible to those who are unable to travel to our annual ACE conference. Summit Snapshot We had over 50 attendees from across the globe who joined us for our roughly 2-hour session. We started by sharing demonstrations by myself, other Aras employees, and even our partner Essig PLM. The demonstrations varied from Configurable Web Services demonstrations to Digital Twin Core extensions. Essig’s solution showed the ability to build a CAD representation of a product based on a Variant Management structure. It’s always incredible to see what people in our community are doing with Aras Innovator® daily. Seeing and discussing these solutions is my highlight of these events. Even if the solutions aren’t relevant to my work, I’m always inspired by how creative people can be. The final half hour of the day was an open discussion. Anyone could join, and we heard from folks across different partners and customers. Some customers wanted to see if any other customers were facing issues similar to their own, while others had suggestions on ways Aras Labs and Aras as a whole could better serve our community. Community Call to Action Part of my demonstration provided an overview of our community resources. The three that I highlighted were my ACE 2024 blog, our Aras Labs GitHub page, and our Community forums. We’re going to put more effort into new Community Projects and be more active on the forums. Labs is a small team, and we need all the help we can get. We would love to have more active community members on the Forums and make more external projects available to our community members. What Next? Although we experienced some technical hiccups, overall, it the event was a great opportunity to reconnect with members of our community. In the coming weeks, we’ll make the recording of the demonstration portion of the event public for people who couldn’t make the event. We’ll take a look at the feedback and make sure that our next event is even more targeted to topics that are top of mind. A huge thank you to Eli Donahue and Erica Schumann, who put our event together very quickly. I’d also like to thank everyone who attended and participated. This kind of event is really dependent on participation, and many of you stepped up to make your voices heard. Stay tuned for future announcements of similar events, both virtual and in person. Don't forget to save the date for ACE 2025, coming to Boston, March 31 - April 3.9 Reasons to Upgrade to Aras Innovator Release 14+
We are excited by all the new functionality and features to the Aras Innovator® platform that are available with our regular release schedule. At ACE 2024, our Product Design Manager, Kenny Sperling, ran a great session about all the UI/UX changes to the platform since release 14. Many people, myself included, weren’t aware of some of the amazing quality-of-life additions introduced within the past few years. While some of these are easy to miss, if you’re like me and are constantly using the platform these can be game changers. I’ll be reviewing some of these changes chronologically as well as sharing which changes come in which service pack. Release 24 had some significant changes to how you interact with a main search grid. You can now copy data from read-only cells in the search grid. In addition to that, you can now edit multiple items directly from the search grid without ever having to open the item form. Release 26 added the ability to add Help Text and Tooltips for item properties. This allows someone to better understand the information they’re being served in a search grid. Release 27 added an excellent indicator when you’re viewing an item that is out of date. This will help you understand the context of the data you’re looking at on a form and help avoid miscommunication when discussing versioning. Also in 27 is the ability to perform an item search by selecting multiple items at once. They’ll be joined by a pipe operator, and your search results will include all the items you have selected. Release 28 included a fast, simple way to see who is claiming an item directly from the main search grid. Release 30 included additional protections when modifying an older version of an item. This has already saved me plenty of time while working collaboratively with others. And finally, the upcoming release 31 has some very interesting features. First off, we have an improved UI for advanced search. This allows you to quickly and easily select properties of a given ItemType using a custom dialog. The final feature is the ability to perform an Excel-like fill-down for rapid data entry. This means that within a search or relationship grid, you can copy the value from one row and apply it to other items immediately. As you can see, there are many reasons to keep your Aras Innovator environment up to date. The product is changing and improving with every quarterly release. I only chose a handful of the changes Kenny showed at ACE to share. He also went into the roadmap for 2024, discussing some really exciting features coming to the product in the next year. Keep an eye out for future blogs where I’ll be covering more exciting improvements. Interested in hearing more about new features in Aras Innovator? Join us on May 9, 2024 at 10:00 AM ET for "What's New in Aras Innovator," in which John Sperling, SVP of Product Management at Aras shares a 30-minute overview and live demonstration of new capabilities, applications, and more.ACE for Developers
Every year, Aras hosts Aras Community Events across the globe to bring together Aras users to share their experiences and best practices, build relationships, and get a sneak peek at new features and applications. Whether you're an Aras expert or a new adopter, ACE has something to offer you.
