How to handle software and its relationship to other parts of the product is often a challenge for companies in the electronic industry. More and more of a product's functionality is determined by the software, and often the difference between two products is what version of the software is installed and which functionality this provides the end user. Therefore it is essential to be able to track which version of the software is valid for which version of the product. To complicate the matter even more, if there are external manufacturers involved in the process, they might for example be assigned a range of MAC addresses per manufacturer, and this information will of course also have to be maintained, recorded and communicated. For service and maintenance of products it is also important to know if the different software versions are backwards compatible with older versions of the product or not, so that an old product is loaded with the correct software version.
The Electronic-PLM solution has been designed so that there is a high degree of flexibility to customize the system to each individual customer's needs for software management, utilizing the platform capabilities of Aras.