Kawasaki Heavy Industries Selects Aras PLM

Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. (KHI), a global manufacturer of equipment for the aerospace, energy, industrial equipment, power, rolling, stock, and shipping industries, with 34,000 employees on 6 continents and over $13 billion in annual revenue, has selected Aras as its enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. KHI will leverage Aras Innovator as a unified platform as a service (PaaS) to streamline new product development and optimize costs within and between its multiple business units.
 
The company reportedly chose Aras because it needed a single scalable and flexible PLM system that would enable it to respond faster to business environment changes and accommodate the unique processes used by the many different business units. Aras is expected to enable KHI’s commitment to sharing technological innovations across its multiple business units to maintain competitive advantage around the world.
 
This is the first time Aras has been selected as a corporate PLM standard across all businesses (typically it is used as a departmental PLM solution). It was reportedly a head-to-head win against Siemens Teamcenter. Currently, KWI has multiple PLM systems running (all notable PLM solutions, including Dassault Systemes Enovia, Teamcenter, PTC Windchill, Oracle’s Agile PLM, and others); Aras believes that each business unit will migrate to Innovator over time.
 
But Siemens PLM Software, while acknowledging the defeat, cites that within KHI, Aras PLM is used largely for documents and drawings management and as a Microsoft Office productivity tool. Siemens is confident that the Aras selection will have no impact on its combined Teamcenter PLM and NX computer-aided design (CAD) deployment. In any case, Aras has evolved from being a mere open source PLM alternative (for tinkering companies) to a full-fledged fierce competitor, possibly even as a corporate standard.