Electronic Signatures and Aras Authentication
The Aras Innovator workflow engine has many options and features that enable the modeling of robust business processes in PLM. One of the options available is the capability to authenticate users before they can complete an activity. You may be asking, why would I want to authenticate a user in a workflow? Or, isn’t supplying a username and password when the user starts Innovator sufficient? In many cases, enabling authentication in workflow is not necessary and login authentication is sufficient to monitor workflow activity actions. However, some activities represent approvals or legal acknowledgments and can result in the release of parts (items), BOMs, and documents. Depending on your business and your PLM strategy, these activities may require additional authentication to be in alignment with regulatory compliance requirements for providing electronic signatures. Continue Reading
If you’re a 3D CAD user, you no doubt recognize the name PTC, or at the very least, Pro/ENGINEER. But with the recent announcement by PTC of their new product line, Creo, the Pro/E brand’s days have become numbered. Creo is a new line of products based on technology from PTC’s three main design and viewing brands, Pro/ENGINEER, ProductView, and CoCreate. Creo was introduced October 28th, 2010 (known up until the launch date as “Project Lightning”) and is slated to be delivered in 2011. Those are the basics, but what is this really all about and why is it important in the PLM industry? 
Regardless of whether you’re interested in EPDM Item BOMs or EPDM Document BOMs, it is important to know what you can and cannot do with Computed BOMs. Computed BOMs are the ones most closely tied to the source data in Enterprise PDM, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot be manipulated. So what is a Computed BOM, how is a Computed BOM different in Documents than it is in Items, and what can you do with a Computed BOM? 
One of the biggest complaints about design automation is performance. Companies are outraged that the tool runs for a whole hour to complete a process that used to take four to six weeks. Despite the obvious lack of perspective here, it is a design automation best practice to consider performance and optimize rules wherever possible. Several sources of performance degradation can be avoided with a little foresight. 
With so many different perspectives on the BOM in today’s organizations, companies have come to expect that different departments will be creating and re-creating content to describe their products. Some will do it with Microsoft Excel, some with Microsoft Word, others with Adobe Illustrator, and others still with an alternative CAD package like AutoCAD. With new tools like 3DVIA Composer, all of this extra effort can be saved. Once metadata is stored in a set of CAD files, 3DVIA Composer lets users slice and dice the content and BOM information in whatever way is relevant for a particular audience, with full associativity for downstream changes. Setting xBOM management in PDM aside, let’s look at how 3DVIA Composer can present very different views of a product’s BOM, visually. 
