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.
