Questions I should have, but never received from prospects… #2 : How much time does it take to change this form?

Posted on October 20, 2012

Second writing of our series of article about questions I feel like I should received more often from prospects. For the first article, I talked about the lack of questions about how PLM solutions can manage evolution  this time it brings me back to a presentation I made for a prospect in Electronic and High-tech industry. I was presenting Aras Innovator and answering questions.  As usual I made not only a presentation of the business features but also the flexibility of the solution as it is by far an advantage of this solution compared to older technologies from the competition. Once again, as I often mention in other articles, flexibility is key because most of the time when you get the features sold by a vendor you will change it, adapting it to your company’s specific needs. So I was at this customer site, and there were just asking me to navigate in the software. But at one point after they saw some of the feature they wanted to see I took more control over the presentation and told them how important it was that the PLM solution should be flexible. So I started to modify some forms to let them feel how they could not only make it quickly but I was also demonstrating that some customizing could be done live during meetings.

In order to illustrate this I made a quick video this week about how you enrich the out-of-the-box part numbering feature in Aras with just one line of coding. Usually, no vendor will code live during a presentation but maybe that’s something that you should ask them. “Please when you come, bring some tech people, we’d like to evaluate for real how fast it will take to implement our specifications.” That’s what you should ask. Until then, enjoy the Video !

Yoann Maingon

Yoann Maingon is an Entrepreneur and a PLM enthousiast. He is our main blogger at Minerva as he has been publishing articles about General PLM concepts and Aras Innovator for more than three years.

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Posted in English | 2 Comments
  • François

    Nice feature indeed! I just would like to know how Aras can handle migration of data when changing the data model. Usually when updating the data model, the existing data has to apply to the new data model, and so the time spent is not triggered by the time spent to modify the data model, but the time spent to migrate the existing data. Is Aras providing some easy way to migrate existing data. For sure it will depend on the change, so let’s continue and assume you want to replace the PRT prefix by SMF. How it will work?

    • http://blog.minerva-plm.com/ Yoann Maingon

      Well, usually, we don’t do so much migration after a change within the system but it’s true that in some cases there can be a need to reprocess all the existing instances of an itemtype to apply a change we’ve just made on the datamodel or on a business logic.
      If we take this example (and I hope I understand the requirement here), after we made that change. Two decisions can be made. Either the change does not affect earlier parts and in this case no further change is needed. Either we want to apply this change to every existing part. If we really know it has to be impacted to every part, whatever the status, the permissions etc (knowing all the consequences). I would in this case, create an action called “Update PartNumbers” which calls a method in which we loop on every instance, read the existing value and replace the PRT by SMF. The action would be ran just once and will then be taken out of the action menu. It’s mainly because we need to read the sequence number and the classification. Else if it’s just a known value, simple AML query could do it using AMLstudio for example. 

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