Carestream Health, a medical and dental imaging, molecular imaging and non-destructive testing product specialist, has selected Aras Innovator suite to replace an “outdated and highly customized implementation of Dassault’s Enovia MatrixOne and a collection of third party and internal legacy systems.” Aras, if you’re unfamiliar with the name, is one of the first vendors to base their business on an open source model in the PLM field.
The new system will provide Carestream Health with “advanced PLM functionality and a modern Microsoft-based platform for global product development and supply chain integration for improved collaboration.” According to the details due tomorrow, Carestream will be implementing Aras’s tools in a phased approach as it’s rolled out to support 3,000 global users and supporting suppliers spread across in the US, Canada, China, Israel and France. The press release which we got an early copy of, has two intriguing quotes from Carestream executives.
“We wanted a single enterprise PLM backbone for engineering, quality and regulatory compliance, tightly integrated with SAP,” said David Sherburne, Leader of Global R&D Effectiveness and champion for this initiative at Carestream Health. “Our legacy platform was built a long time ago and we knew we didn’t have the functionality required for the future; it was time to carefully look at our options. We required a rapidly deployable solution coupled with a sustainable cost model. When compared to other PLM suppliers, Aras offered a solution unique to the industry.”
“We’re a progressive company and we want to work with other forward-thinking companies who can help us eliminate organizational silos and increase collaborative development to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Bruce Leidal, CIO at Carestream Health. “In switching to Aras we now have a highly capable, global PLM platform that will allow us to consolidate other systems at will, increasing reuse and improving collaboration without continual capital investment in PLM licenses.”
There’s an undercurrent here of a major medical device manufacturer looking at its current PLM system and staring into the distance and the future of its business and seeing that a highly proprietary PLM system that locks it’s user in isn’t in that crystal ball. I’m due to meet the guys from Aras at COFES in April and I’m going to dig into what Aras have to offer and to find out exactly what they mean by Open Source and how it differs from what else is out there on the market.
