To be successful in outsourcing design or manufacturing, several distinct disciplines need to function in concert with your partner. To start, Engineering needs to assemble the product specifications and requirements, Sourcing needs to provide approved vendor / manufacturer lists, Manufacturing needs to deliver process instructions, Quality needs to furnish test procedures, and compliance requirements with associated rationale need to be clearly spelled out. Once work begins, everything from first article inspections to final signoff needs to be coordinated across departmental and organizational boundaries. In practice, however, outsourced design and manufacturing projects pose several additional challenges.
As products develop or as designs change to reflect manufacturability and supply chain considerations, cross-functional teams need to collaborate to ensure the best outcome. This means hundreds or perhaps thousands of activities (down to item-level review / approval tasks) need to be efficiently orchestrated to stay on schedule and on budget. Unfortunately, this is complicated by the complexity of the product team, which is often widely distributed and comprised of empowered workers who review decisions, make recommendations and approve changes. To be effective they need the ability to instantly view and communicate current product and project information. As if this were not enough, when partners are involved, accountability for timely and accurate decision making is more than a nice-to-have. It can have significant financial implications enforceable by contractual commitments.
Arena PLM addresses these challenges with an innovative project collaboration solution that ties a project to the product record, continually synchronizing team member activities in full context of the current product design. Using template-driven project definition, Arena PLM 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.
Arena PLM enables each team member to easily 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 project 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. Because all parties — from OEM employees to global supply chain partners — can 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.
Quickly Enable Collaboration by Suppliers and Partners
Enabling suppliers and business partners to participate in collaborative programs can be technically challenging, but it can also present hidden costs and cultural challenges as well. Suppliers can offer valuable insight, but if the costs to manage the relationship increase, your fully landed cost will almost certainly be higher than it needs to be. Supplier users also have varying technical competencies, abilities and work processes that need to adjust to your business.
Arena PLM removes technical barriers to effective partner collaboration. Suppliers need only a web browser and Internet connection-there is no additional software or hardware for them to buy. With Arena PLM you quickly and easily invite an unlimited number of suppliers, partners and contract manufacturers into your collaboration workspace without the headaches typically associated with behind-the-firewall applications.
Arena's access controls can be configured to allow suppliers (and other third party partners) full participation as virtual members of the team or to limit them to only certain product structures or items. Routine quote updates can be performed easier and faster-saving time compared to emailing or faxing paperwork. You can also grant suppliers self-service access to revision-controlled drawings and design documents. Suppliers become more efficient administering data updates and managing collaboration requests, so they save time and money and can offer more compelling services and better pricing.
Support Closed-Loop Design and Sourcing Processes
Regardless of organizational boundaries, Arena PLM provides consistent support for collaborative request and change processes. You can define processes to continually capture improvement suggestions from suppliers and to provide early visibility to all product team members to manage the impacts of design change.
Arena's closed-loop framework allows requests to be escalated or grouped into change orders, preserving collaboration history and context for future use. You can define unlimited tracking codes and specify flexible evaluation and review groups for the routing of workflow notices to support the way your company does business. Out of the box, Arena provides common-sense rules to mitigate blind revisioning and ensure staged routing, so lower-level approvals must be obtained before routing to the next stage.
Drive Active Partner Participation
By providing the framework for effective collaboration, Arena PLM removes cost from the supply chain — instead of shifting it from one company to another. And, because it's easy to invite and manage access authority for new users, you can quickly add new partners to capitalize on changing opportunities anywhere around the globe.
Arena is also easy to use so suppliers can focus on your projects, not on learning a new system. By leveraging convenient on-demand training, suppliers can be sharing and collaborating on your latest designs within a very short time frame (typically less than a week).
Protect Critical Intellectual Assets with a Proven Financial Grade Security Infrastructure
Arena has created an ultra high security infrastructure by assembling leading technologies proven to be the most secure for each function. All firewalls and encryption devices are sourced from leading Internet security providers, configured by expert professionals, and tested rigorously before being placed into production. Our single instance, multi-tenant architecture extends these benefits to all customers, protecting intellectual property and securing information from inappropriate access far more effectively than even the best on-premise deployments. Arena’s extensive investment in a high-grade production networking system also provides near continuous system availability and fault tolerance.
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