Collaboration
Support consistent review and approval processes.
Informal, manual procedures usually produce variable results. In custom tooled or hand tailored products, this is not necessarily bad and people often want uniqueness in their products. But for companies with complex products or operating environments, needless variation in process or design rarely produces the consistently high quality and performance that companies and customers expect from their products. Even companies with a mass-customization product strategy look to ensure that design or process changes produce value.
Free Whitepaper Download
New Product Introduction: Challenges & Solutions from the Arena Project Collaboration Study
92% of respondents faced challenges that impact NPD and NPI.
Learn more about our findings and how we can help.
Collaboration Overview
Lack of standardized processes makes it expensive and time consuming to support ongoing improvement initiatives (e.g., quality, manufacturability, cost, time to market) across product lines or departments. This is especially true for companies who outsource and need to align suppliers and business partners with strategic goals. Without a framework to coordinate their efforts, the risks of outsourcing can easily outweigh the potential rewards.
Arena helps you capture and share input from customers, suppliers and partners as well as internal users from Engineering, Manufacturing, Procurement, and Quality Control. Your expert team collaboratively analyzes reported problems and builds a knowledge repository that captures ideas for new products and improvements-wherever they may originate. Arena ensures that valuable feedback never slips through the cracks, but is continually and efficiently leveraged to help design superior products.
When designs need to change, Arena efficiently manages review and approval for multiple types of engineering change orders across the extended product team. Through a system of notifications and alerts, Arena proactively links users to changing information and provides advanced tools to collaborate across organizations and time zones. Arena eliminates information lag time throughout product development so everyone from suppliers to production is operating from the same version of the product master record.
Tailor Work Processes and User Access to Changing Organizational Needs
With Arena you can capture and organize information according to your needs, and then configure the way users view information and interact with each other. Best of all, Arena allows non-technical users the ability to do this in minutes without the headaches of writing code or hiring costly consultants.
Using highly flexible and powerful categorization you can standardize information on items, files, and request/change processes.
Collaborative workflow processes are entirely under your control—you define the engineering request and change processes you need to support your changing business requirements. You configure the structure and behavior of requests and changes, and have full control over workflow routings, users, roles, approval requirements, and actions expected by change control board members. You can invite suppliers and partners to participate fully, or limit them to review and approval roles.
Regardless of how you customize Arena—whether you utilize “Smart layout” default views, add categorization and custom attributes, or leverage drag and drop customization tools—your changes will be preserved in future Arena upgrades.
Enable Advanced Real-Time Visibility into the Product Record
Having accurate information at your fingertips the instant you need it is perhaps the most basic–and yet one of the most complex–business needs to satisfy. The challenge becomes exponentially more difficult with every user or IT system added to the mix, and it's particularly challenging for large or globally distributed organizations / teams.
Component and product structure information can be highly dynamic and detailed. This is true even during the production stage where short component lifecycles, supplier part changes, part shortages, price spikes and field failures can force design changes.
Unfortunately, because there are many users of product information, the complete product master record tends to be spread across multiple systems of record. As a result, the challenge in accessing accurate product details is notoriously difficult. But, as anybody with poor BOM accuracy is likely to tell you, the risk of not being able to do so significantly impacts virtually all operational areas of the business.
Arena captures the full design specification of a product from concept through end-of-life in a secure, central repository. Starting in early design, Arena tracks component-level estimates and quotes, and then automatically aggregates assembly-level costs via the BOM structure. This enables designers to make better design trade-offs that can significantly impact product profitability. As designs change, Arena tracks notes, issues, and recommendations, providing users instant reporting against a single version of the product master record with complete historical context.
Arena is also designed for easy integration with multiple enterprise systems to ensure ERP, CAD, PDM, and other operational systems are always up to date with the latest version of the product master.
Execute and Analyze Product Projects
Many companies today have turned to lean operating principles and flatter organizational structures to remain competitive. Departmental boundaries have become more informal and companies often organize cross-functional project teams to focus resources and deal with specific issues - both strategic and tactical. For example, product management teams are often organized to manage compliance to an emerging statute, address quality issues, or launch a new product to market. In practice, however, managing product development projects poses several unique challenges.
For one, in product projects, change is the rule not the exception. Critical design decisions are often made only after rounds of experimentation, prototyping, and testing, so it's usually difficult to predict at the outset which branch of research and development will produce the most viable product design. This makes it difficult for traditional "left to right" planning tools built on pre-defined assumptions to develop useful plans for managing the execution of the project.
Second, product development projects can be comprised of 1,000s of interdependent tasks, any one of which can delay a project or put it at risk. But, as a product design evolves, the underlying product definition (e.g., Bill of Materials) changes as well. Imagine a building contractor planning around a constantly changing floor plan - it just doesn't work! Particularly when key components need to be tracked as their own project within a larger project, keeping task assignments aligned with a product as it changes from one design phase to the next can be daunting.
Finally, product teams are often widely distributed across geographic and organizational boundaries, and they are comprised of knowledge workers, empowered to make recommendations and review decisions. To be effective each team member needs the ability to see and update current product and project information, including detailed product specs and documentation. The traditional approach of funneling feedback through a central project manager impedes the flow of information and simply doesn't scale across numerous and more complex projects.
Arena addresses these challenges through an innovative design that ties a project to the product record—continually synchronizing planning with execution. Using template-driven project definition, Arena generates complex project plans automatically based on the bill of material so team members always get current task assignments and common activities across projects can be managed consistently enterprise-wide. In addition, each team member can view and update product and project information to reflect current status—removing the need for manual information gathering by a project manager via phone, fax, email, etc. This includes the ability to drill into project status at any step in the process or at any assembly level, enabling your entire team to gauge the "domino effect" that can result from one delay, a missed deadline, or an unavoidable component change. By enabling all parties—from OEM employees to global supply chain partners—to track project progress in real time the entire product team can make decisions with full contextual knowledge of the product and recent decisions to keep projects on time and on budget.
Communicate Instantly Across Your Product Team
Even when different people have the same information at their fingertips, there are times when a quick conversation can clear up an issue. For colleagues working side by side, this happens all the time. But when key product team members are distributed globally across geographies and organizations, instant conversations can be a bit more challenging.
Arena bridges this communication gap by providing instant voice and text chat capabilities directly from Arena. You can see who is online anywhere around the global and within seconds ask questions, discuss product issues, and even support personalized distance learning-right from your desktop using Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. This provides a practical way to personalize collaboration and help solve problems, confirm plans, or just build winning relationships.
Additional Resources
