History
In 1994, our founders Michael and Eric were running Light & Motion Industries, a manufacturer of underwater video camera housings and lighting systems. Up until that time, as tedious as it was, they had gotten by using Excel spreadsheets to manage the bills of materials (BOMs) for their products. But with a growing number of new models in the works—and plans to introduce additional product lines—their product team was making changes to the BOMs more frequently and the company’s product data was growing increasingly complex.
Michael and Eric believed there had to be a better way to manage their constantly changing product data. What they wanted was a tool that was structured enough to fully capture the layered relationships linking parts and data in a BOM, flexible enough to manage changes when designs were still in flux and controlled enough to lock down the data once it was approved and released for manufacturing. All they found, though, were cumbersome, six-figure enterprise applications and flimsy, single-user desktop tools, each of which solved bits and pieces of the problem, none of which solved everything and all of which missed the main point: That it has to start with the BOM. To capture complete product data, manage changes to that data and give every member of the product team access to the pieces of data they need, a system must have the bill of materials at its core, as the framework around which all data, processes and access are organized.
Anyone who knows Michael and Eric would not be surprised to learn that when they couldn’t find a solution they liked, they felt they had no choice but to build one themselves. And so the original prototype for Arena was born. The term product lifecycle management (PLM) wasn’t around yet, but full-featured PLM is what they built: a system that was used by the entire Light & Motion organization to manage the design, sourcing, manufacture and sale of its products as they moved from concept through end-of-life.
By early 2000, Light & Motion had been enjoying years of significant gains in productivity, product quality and profit margins. At the same time Michael and Eric were watching advances in Internet speeds, web standards and software technology. There was still no commercial answer to the problem they thought needed be solved, so Arena the company was born and Arena the application was built from the ground up as an on-demand BOM and change management system. Both the company and the application started with the name bom.com, as a reflection of the solution’s two most important aspects: the bill of materials (bom) as the organizing framework and the Internet (.com) as the delivery model that enabled the kind of collaboration, availability and other benefits that only an online solution could provide.
Flash forward a decade (and a little more).
With customers across a wide range of industries and tens of thousands of users all over the world, Arena has stayed true to its roots of providing manufacturers with a better way to centralize, control and collaborate around the product data that is the lifeblood of their organizations. While the application’s footprint has expanded over the years, at its core Arena is still an on-demand collaborative BOM and change management tool that gives small and mid-size manufacturers an easy-to-start, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use solution for centralizing product data, controlling the engineering change process and sharing BOMs with suppliers.
Today, new customers get up and running on Arena in less than 5 days at an extremely low upfront cost. They quickly start seeing the first benefits—increased productivity, greater efficiencies, accurate data—and as development cycles progress, they begin enjoying benefits like faster time to market, more consistent product quality and superior product margins too.
What’s next for Arena?
As we continue to grow, what won’t change is our commitment to giving small and mid-size manufacturers a better way to manage product data and the product development process. But we will always be looking at how we can make this better way, well, even better. Stay tuned.
