Intelligent BOM Management for Today’s Product Innovators

Arena recently launched a new white paper called, “Today’s Product Innovators Need Intelligent BOM Management”. This white paper has all the answers to your burning bill of materials (BOM) management questions. This white paper is a must-read for operations managers and anyone who needs best management practices for the bill of materials. This white paper captures the imagination of innovative Internet of Things (IoT) companies as the book “Where the Wild Things Are” enchanted adventurous young children.

My stars. This white paper is a veritable cornucopian treat for any innovative product development company interested in learning the true meaning and splendor of a cloud product development platform.

The white paper opens by looking at the evolution of complex products and challenges of managing global supply chains by immediately referencing the Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 battery issues.

The blistering evolution of technology and outsourced manufacturing has created new opportunities, but has also introduced new challenges and risks. One doesn’t have to look very far to see how poor product design and development processes can impact companies and their customers—both upstream and downstream.

With globally dispersed supply chain teams and more stringent compliance standards, companies demand tighter control of their intellectual property (IP), which is often managed in a BOM.

BOMs define everything necessary to manufacture products and comprise the core building blocks of the product record. For those reasons, modern product development platforms consistently tie-back to the product record, as opposed to an artificial staid document which is less apt to keep all stakeholders informed real-time. By extension, the white paper illustrates that too often BOMs are managed across multiple systems by engineering and manufacturing teams. This leads to disconnected development processes frequently resulting in product launch delays, quality issues, manufacturing mistakes and costly scrap and rework to correct product issues when all are not on the same page.

Product innovators must turn to more intelligent BOM solutions to eliminate obstacles and deliver superior products.

Real-time collaboration is enhanced with cloud-based solutions that enable dispersed product teams to communicate throughout the entire product development process. Egos, silos, and ‘not-invented-here’ all have to be checked at the door so as to remove friction from the system. These teams are only as effective as their weakest link in the supply chain, and some partners may not have the sophisticated infrastructure or independent teams to help design, source, build and ship products. With a BOM (read product record) centric solution, all teams and tiers of the global supply chain can easily access information and collaborate anytime and anywhere.

Five key requirements that intelligent BOM management solutions should address to streamline product development are discussed in this white paper. These requirements include:

1. Centralize control of the BOM, product record, and change processes

2. Provide secure access and accountability for internal and external teams

3. Deliver comprehensive BOM management capabilities

4. Improve collaboration with formal and informal communication

5. Perform proactive health and risk assessments on BOM components

The white paper discusses each of these requirements in detail.

Arena began by providing the ability to create, change, and release products, which is the core of any good product lifecycle management (PLM) system. As customers’ manufacturing models became more distributed and complex, broader product process support was added to ensure products could be designed, manufactured, and shipped on time without incident.

Today, Arena’s unified product development platform (PDP) solution includes more extended product processes than any other multi-tenant cloud-based PLM solution on the market. And, as it’s a single solution, it tamps down any anxiety over interoperability issues.

These extended product processes include management of the core product record with connections to:

• Quality and corrective action preventive action (CAPA) processes

• Project management information

• Product requirements, hardware defects and bug tracking

• Component lifecycle and compliance information

• Product demand analysis

• Product analytics

• Employee training records

• Supply chain partners

• Enterprise integrations (e.g., CAD, ERP, Quality Inspection, SSO)

Arena has extended the traditional borders of PLM to deliver a true single-source solution where all teams can collaborate across the extended supply chain.

Please download this white paper today. This is the last and only bill of materials white paper you’ll ever need.