Multiple Files for a Single Document and Referencing Hard Copy Documents in Aras

MarcL: PLM solutions should make it possible to link multiple files to various versions of a managed object so they may be managed, checked-in/out or reported on as unit including view versions (PDFs, docx, CAD, etc.) as appropriate with mark-ups.

And if a company continues to maintain some documents in paper formats or off-site on digital back up, then the indexing capabilities of the PLM solution should be able to reference that data.

Data collections or packages of managed files should be able to be created and referred by a common name or number, and should support folders containing or referencing other folders.

Please describe how this is supported.

Peter Schroer:

Multiple Files for 1 Document Item

One-to-Many relationships from business objects (Document, Part, Folder, etc) to File are standard out-of-the-box in Aras Innovator.

A common example of a use case for this data model rule is allowing a native CAD file and one or more viewable formats of that CAD file to be controlled as a single record.

This OOTB capability is extensible in Aras and can be easily customized to accommodate special circumstances at your company.

Screenshot Example of an Aras Document Item with Multiple Files Associated

Referencing Hard Copy Data

Often a company continues to maintain some documents and other related data in paper form or off-site in archive (like Iron Mountain) or in digital back-up format, and you need the PLM environment to account for these by indexing and referencing that data.

Out-of-the-box Document Management in Aras allows document control records to exist and be managed through lifecycles without physical files attached.

As a convenience to your end users, you could even add an attribute to the data model to specify the location of the paper drawings (Level effort to add this field is < 1 hour).

Using Folders for Files

The Aras Innovator platform has a Folder item out-of-the-box which is used to group documents, specifications, parts, tooling, etc. that are affected by a single enterprise change order.

If your company wants a more general Folder-style management of documents, then a “Folder” Item can easily be added and used for a wide variety of purposes.

Your Folder item naturally inherits all of the Aras Innovator core platform services and can have security permissions, business rules, lifecycles, workflow routings, etc. applied to them.

Tags: Architecture, customize, document management, File Vaulting, Files, framework, Items, Objects, platform, Vault