Eric Larkin

Eric is co-founder and chief technology officer of Arena Solutions, overseeing product strategy, design, development and operations. He first realized the importance of managing product information well in the early 1990s as CTO of Light & Motion Industries (LMI), a vertically integrated manufacturer of underwater video equipment, where superior information management helped LMI become the leader in its industry. Subsequent product design and manufacturing roles strengthened his conviction that better information management enables better engineering, and in 2000 Eric reunited with several colleagues to architect Arena, a bill of materials (BOM) and change management system in the cloud, and start delivering it to manufacturers everywhere.

Eric loves engineering: electrical, mechanical, firmware, software, manufacturing…he’s a sucker for pretty much any kind of engineering. He very much enjoys being part of a world-class engineering team building products that help manufacturers make their own products better and faster.

Eric Larkin’s most recent posts:

• What’s wrong with the fire-and-forget method for build package exchange?

  As I briefly touched upon in my previous post, manufacturers have surprisingly few tools designed for efficient product data sharing. Most communicate product data to their suppliers with email, spreadsheets and even […]

• How the cloud will revolutionize build package exchange

  The exchange of product data between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their supply chain partners is one of the most important processes in manufacturing. The initial handoff of design data to suppliers for […]

• 3 ways the cloud will change manufacturing

  When we founded Arena in 2000, it was uncommon (unique, even) to deliver PLM, and manufacturing software in general, as a cloud application. In fact, our main integration challenge was configuring our cloud BOM and […]

• Two rules for rolling a revision up the tree

  When incorporating a new component revision, many manufacturers struggle with the question of whether to trigger a new revision of the assembly. You don’t want to bury yourself in a pile of pointless documentation […]

• Rolling revisions up the tree 101: When, how and why

  Over the years, I’ve seen many new Arena customers wrestle with the question of whether a new component revision should trigger a new revision of the assembly or assemblies that contain it.

• Does open-design hardware have a place in manufacturing?

  Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. And […]