The PLM developer Aras has entered into a partnership with Toshiba Digital Solutions, a subsidiary of the electronics giant Toshiba Group. The company provides system integration services, software solutions and services, technology support and consultation services to clients by utilizing the knowledge that they have amassed across numerous business domains, along with cutting-edge technologies such as IoT, AI and quantum computing.
Aras’ PLM platform, Innovator, will be integrated with Toshiba's Meister platform, which is an IoT solution for the manufacturing sector that is used to collect data and connect to factories to help them reap the benefits of digital twin technology.
“Industries across the board are rapidly undergoing digital transformation, especially the automotive and manufacturing sectors. The ability to be agile and respond quickly to the ever-evolving organizational needs is crucial. Our partnership with Toshiba Digital Solutions will allow customers the opportunity to be agile and innovative,” Aras CEO Roque Martin says to engineering.com.
Why is this partnership important? There are several reasons, and the answer requires a brief overview of the group's current market position.
Toshiba is a well-known name in home electronics. The company created the world's first laptop, participated in a global “media format war” in the 2000s and developed the NAND flash memory, which is necessary to store data on mobile devices without powering down.
But the last few years have been turbulent within the group, and the company isn’t what it used to be. Losses in the nuclear business forced the group to sell off a majority stake in the memory chip business. But Toshiba is still third globally in terms of NAND manufacturing—although this business (renamed Kioxia Holdings), according to an article in Bloomberg, has fallen behind market leader Samsung Electronics.
The Bloomberg article further notes that “Kioxia, which is still 40 percent owned by Toshiba, is the world’s [number three] maker of NAND, while Toshiba is now the smallest of the world’s three remaining hard-disk drive suppliers. Both sectors are getting squeezed by tepid electronics demand. During fiscal 2023, Toshiba Group’s revenues were $26.3 billion, around a seven percent decline from 2022.”
Great Need of Digital Twin Technology
It remains to be seen exactly what the technology partnership between Aras and Toshiba Digital Solutions can do in this turbulent environment. However, it’s clear that the need for state-of-the-art digital twin technology among its customers—based on Aras’ open and low-code environment and easy-to-use Innovator platform—can play an important role as a highly communicative bridge between technologically disparate business units over product lifecycles. The commercial content of today’s deal means that Toshiba Digital Solutions will distribute Aras Innovator to other companies and customers in the Toshiba group.
The partnership is interesting from several perspectives. Partly because it means a commercial statement of strength for Aras’ application platform, as a strong support solution with regard to Toshiba’s ability to deliver the latest digital twin technology to customers. And partly because this low-code-based PLM solution possesses the technological breadth required to design, build and operate complex products in the electronics, semiconductor and data areas, which is the hallmark of Toshiba Digital Solutions’ customer sphere.
An Agreement with Potential
Aras' president of the Japanese movement, Masahiko Hisatsugu, says in a comment that the Toshiba deals are sitting on strong potential. He notes that, "Customer requirements are becoming increasingly complex as the manufacturing industry continues to undergo digital transformation. Working with Toshiba Digital Solutions will enable us to bring our expertise and innovative approaches to more customers as we expand our company's footprint in Japan.”
Customers will be able to realize and take advantage of a range of benefits from the partnership, including:
- Complete end-to-end product lifecycle management, from requirements and engineering to manufacturing and operations.
- A simple, low-code methodology that is scalable and fully customizable.
- The ability to quickly respond to rapidly changing business operations and organizational needs.
Connects Users to Critical Product and Process Data
Aras Innovator has been sharpened significantly in recent years, particularly under the company's current CEO, Roque Martin. Generally, this broad platform houses a range of applications for managing product lifecycle data in a way that connects users across all disciplines and functions to critical product data and processes across the entire lifecycle and throughout the extended supply chain.
Among the company's customers and users are several prominent companies that bear witness to these values: Airbus, Audi, DENSO, Honda, Kawasaki, Microsoft, Mitsubishi and Nissan are some examples.
In these cases, Aras Innovator is being used in a multitude of different ways, either delivering complimentary and extended solutions to their existing PLM system landscape, being the enterprise innovation backbone or providing a traditional PLM solution.
With this degree of flexibility, Aras is an excellent match to the Toshiba Group’s challenges. By broadening their spread and making the sharing of innovative solutions and rational manufacturing sequences easily accessible to customers, Toshiba will be able to speed up the innovative work and create smooth and uniform flows around manufacturing data.
When it comes to Toshiba’s intention to spread Aras’ digital twin technology, it has developed a competitive solution around building, maintaining and navigating easily from various engineering applications to digital twin data, and leveraging different views of the data.
“Many larger companies have already invested in PLM applications that haven’t solved all the business challenges, hence the reason that several companies are investing in Aras to complement their current PLM application landscape with a very flexible and agile solution, allowing them to solve the challenges they haven’t today,” commented Leon Lauritsen, VP of Operations EMEA at Aras. “Interestingly, in recent years we have seen a trend that these companies, after having seen the power of our platform, are now deciding to replace their legacy PLM systems with Aras.”