Increasingly companies of all sizes are reaching out to suppliers, 3rd-party design firms, and contract manufacturers for new ideas to improve their products and bring them to market faster. Even within their own organizations, product managers are inviting their counterparts in Procurement, Manufacturing, and Quality Control to participate more actively in design decisions throughout the product lifecycle, particularly early on. The business challenge of managing multiple stakeholders quickly becomes a complex logistical challenge—how to keep everyone current on the latest changes and synchronized around critical project milestones.
Paper documents are clumsy and become instantly outdated when components go obsolete or designs change overnight. Using this outdated information can produce a barrage of disconnected requests, changes, and bad decisions. This decreases engineering productivity and introduces delays into tight project time tables. But perhaps, more tangibly, outdated information hits the bottom line in excess and obsolete inventory from wrong or out-of-revision builds. If this were not bad enough, the practice of exchanging paper or electronic files containing design information represents an even greater threat. That is, once intellectual property leaves your company in any form, you lose all control over inadvertent disclosure to unauthorized parties—even months or years after terminating a relationship.
Arena PLM enables companies to standardize product information in a central, shared repository where it is managed and exposed to authorized users. Arena's repository serves as a central connection point to synchronize rapidly changing part and product structure information across systems, and it helps reduce design errors while increasing the speed of information access.
By eliminating disparate sources of out-of-sync product data and enabling engineers to find the parts and information they're looking for, companies maximize part reuse from preferred suppliers.
With Arena PLM, all product team members have a complete historical product record at their fingertips so they can evaluate the reasons behind design decisions and recommendations, and evaluate information in the broad context of the entire product record.
Provide Persistent Global Access to a Centralized,
Revision-Controlled Product Master Record
Arena PLM enables even the most highly distributed organizations to ensure that authorized product team members across time zones and organizations have secure, persistent access to current product information. Arena's extensive investment in a high-grade production networking system makes this possible by providing continuous system availability and fault tolerance.
Arena's network also provides an ultra-high security infrastructure. 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. The only technology they need to access Arena PLM is a standard web browser and Internet connection.
Once invited to participate, authorized users have access according to role-based privileges that allow them to view, update, or add to the revision-controlled product master record containing all items, BOMs, files, costs/quotes, and sourcing relationships, (i.e., AVL / AML). Throughout the entire product lifecycle, Arena tracks complete change and revision history, and allows you to subscribe to automatic notifications associated with your items, so you always know when changes occur, and it's always easy to identify the latest, most current version of the product.
View and Manage Design Activities in the Context of the Product Record
Providing product team members fingertip access to current product information is critical, but it's only part of the answer to improving engineering productivity. If they can't easily determine how to focus their energies and leverage team resources, productivity and on-time performance take the hit. The problem is that for product projects, change is the rule not the exception.
As a product design evolves, the underlying product definition (e.g., bill of material) changes, effectively changing or re-shuffling thousands of related design and sourcing activities—any one of which can delay a project or put it at risk. Keeping task assignments aligned with a product as it changes from one design phase to the next can be daunting, and it only gets more challenging when the product team is widely distributed.
Arena PLM goes beyond product and process management by enabling real time visibility into the status and condition of design activities affecting a product. 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. This innovative design ties project activities to the product record—continually synchronizing task assignments, and exposing critical activities that can affect on-time and on-target completion of a project plan.
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 maximize its effectiveness and keep projects on time and on budget.
Improve Process Efficiency and Documentation Control
The emergence of various quality (e.g., ISO), industry (e.g., UL), and regulatory (e.g., RoHS) initiatives has forced many companies to take a critical look at how to manage product development processes and how to track related documentation across multiple departments. Customers with custom specifications are also demanding more detailed product information, so building out a full product specification encompassing ongoing product changes and related documentation is more important than ever before.
Arena PLM addresses these challenges by supporting key product change management processes and by offering advanced file management tools designed to reduce document administration overhead across multiple departments. Arena dynamically links authorized users anywhere in the world to changing information via automated workflow. Users receive a notification anytime an item or assembly for which they are responsible changes, and they can immediately access the latest revisions and documentation in complete historical context.
To improve administration and multiple-user access to documentation, Arena PLM provides easy-to-use vaulting and edition control capabilities. This enables users to securely capture documents, and keep them current. Authorized users then have fingertip access to the latest specifications and datasheets, manufacturing procedures, and evidence records and can quickly determine whether they have the most recent edition.
Improve Designs through Early Visibility
Making solid decisions early in design is perhaps one of the best ways to improve engineering productivity because it avoids downstream changes, that become progressively more difficult and expensive as designs advance to completion. By providing product team members early design visibility, Arena exposes critical product details to colleagues and partners at a time when designs can most easily be changed to address issues or accommodate useful suggestions. Arena also provides powerful component information and analysis tools to help you make informed component decisions.
Arena PLM tracks component-level cost estimates and quotes, and then automatically aggregates assembly-level costs via the BOM. Through our partnership with Avnet Prómiere, a leading provider of technical information, Arena also provides dynamic component reference content in the context of the product structure. This makes it easier than ever to evaluate compliance and obsolescence data, review manufacturers documentation, and research costs and lead time. This improved access to information not only helps engineers cut the time it takes them to research components, but it also helps them pick the best components for their products. Arena PLM extends these benefits to authorized users from other departments, suppliers, and partners so they can evaluate components where ever they are used and at any stage in the lifecycle.
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