Quickie: Aras acquires for PLM + MRO capabilities
Aras announced last week that it has acquired infoTRAK MRO from Infospectrum and renamed the product Aras Impresa MRO. MRO stands for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul and is a key component in many asset operators’ strategies: planning who, what, when and how to do maintenance to maximize uptime and profitability.
In making the announcement, Aras said, “With the Impresa acquisition, Aras will deliver PLM and MRO on a single, modern platform that extends the Digital Thread to the field and provides the foundation for Digital Twin.” The company said that its customers increasingly want to offer capacity-as-a-service, which means that they “need to transform how they develop products and plan to service them in the field. Connecting their PLM to MRO gives these companies a path to achieve both goals with a closed loop between product development and field data”. That’s absolutely key to many equipment makers’ thinking about reinventing their products in an IoT/Industry 4.0 age.
infoTRAK MRO managed everything from planning and scheduling maintenance events, to their execution with operational activities such as inspection and work card generation. From reading through the InfoTRAK MRO website, it seems targeted to the aerospace industry, but I would imagine that Aras will quickly make it more general-purpose.
No financial details were given, but Aras did say that it is acquiring technology, intellectual property, and subject matter expertise (ie. people). Aras plans to incorporate Impresa MRO onto the Aras PLM Platform. According to Aras, Impresa MRO will be available as part of Aras enterprise subscriptions and is immediately available at no charge for current Aras subscribers. So, go!
