Aras Digital Twin Core – A PLM Database for Physical Parts?

A new name caught my attention earlier this week- Digital Twin Core (DTC). The name belongs to Aras Corp announcing new applications enabling the creation of Digital Twins. Check out the press release here.

Current digital twin initiatives focus on maintenance effectiveness, recalls, closed-loop quality, product innovation, and production throughput. Problems occur during analysis due to a lack of context or inaccuracies about that asset or product. “As a real-world asset is maintained, updated and retrofitted, companies need the ability to easily reflect the real-time accurate status of the digital twin configuration,” said Peter Schroer, Founder, and CEO of Aras. “Without an accurate configuration twin, companies risk analysis misinterpretations that lead to incorrect actions, safety issues, and liability

The idea is pretty simple – every product has its physical representation. So, let’s create a model of this representation in a digital form.

Aras Digital Twin Core creates and manages the exact digital representation of an individual physical asset and its changes over time. This digital twin configuration mirrors a specific unit in operation such as an individual vehicle by VIN or aircraft by tail number. Digital Twin Core provides a low-code editor for modeling, adapting and extending highly sophisticated configuration twin representations. When combined with Aras 3D dynamic product navigation and graph views, users gain advanced visualization to see digital twin relationships throughout the product structure.

I sat together (virtually) with  Mark Reisig and the great team of Aras people presenting and explaining about Aras DTC (Digital Twin Core) and diynamic product navigation features. The picture below shared by Aras (even with confidential note) can give you the idea of what Aras believes can bring the biggest value to manufacturing companies.

The story of physical assets creation demonstrates how Aras creates a reflection of the physical parts, maintains physical BOM, or visualizes the digital thread.

The process itself is simple and you can see Aras user interface with predefined business logic and new physical semantics and terms.

So, what is Aras DTC? A fancy new PLM buzzword or great technology and application? This question was buzzing in my head during an entire presentation. Here are a few thoughts that can help you to make your conclusion.

1- Aras DTC demonstrates the flexibility of the Aras platform to manage data and adapt different semantics of representation. You can see “physical” applies everywhere and gives you a perspective of a different model.

2- Aras DTC is not changing much from what Aras does as a platform by introducing the new application. Named as a “low-code” capabilities of creating new models. it clearly has data management capabilities that expands current Aras product semantics.

3- Integration with other systems (time data) is the most interesting part of the DTC application because it introduces a new dimension for companies to collect together physical and digital data representations.

What is my conclusion?

Aras DTC is a very nice application. It clearly demonstrates the power of Aras flexible platform. It represents a very interesting use case for Aras technology to shine and demo flexible model capabilities. DTC represents a new semantics of application but doesn’t change Aras foundation and tech. How much of this application is just semantics and how much of this is real technology helping to establish a new type of model – physical product model. I think the reality check for Aras is to go beyond and connect Aras DTC to all data sources as described in the picture above. Once it is one in real life, the DTC core will not just be a PLM database of physical parts but will represent real-time physical data. Connecting with the real world via sensors and cloud services and capturing real-time information is a key. The time will show where DTC story will take Aras. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.