Why PLM?

Whether your challenge is managing BOMs, design documents, costs, change orders, compliance—or all of the above—PLM can help:

• Increase revenues and product profitability.
• Drive faster innovation and accelerate time to market by up to 50%.
• Reduce costs by up to 40%.
• Streamline business processes for up to 75% improvement in product change cycles.
• Facilitate collaboration with your global supply chain.
• Reduce the cost and difficulty of regulatory compliance (RoHS, WEEE, 21 CFR Part 11, EuP, etc.).

Today, organizations are being asked to do more with fewer resources. Product complexity is increasing while product lifecycles are compressing. To compete, manufacturers must increase the rate of product innovation and accelerate time to market, while tightly managing costs and relentlessly driving quality. At the same time, manufacturers must comply with an increasing number of standards and regulations. For most, the battle to address these challenges begins in product development, before their first unit is produced.

Some companies look to the centralized nature of Enterprise Requirements Planning (ERP) for help, but while ERP systems are good for planning and execution during the production phase of the product lifecycle, they’re not ideally suited to the unique challenges of managing products from concept through end of life.

Other companies have turned to lean operating strategies — flattening organizational structures and de-emphasizing departmental boundaries in favor of cross-functional project teams. This is evidenced by “SWAT” teams focused on areas like cost reduction, quality improvement, and new product introduction (NPI).

Product development teams have applied both strategies, but accomplishing strategic goals such as decreasing time to market, reducing product costs and ensuring compliance has kept product teams dependent on manual processes supported by spreadsheets and a hodgepodge of disparate IT systems. Even given a purely operational focus these informal product management processes often result in poor BOM accuracy, missed ECOs, and project delays resulting in wrong builds, excess/obsolete inventory, and missed product launch dates.

One problem is that the dynamic nature of the product itself makes planning around products as difficult as managing construction around a constantly changing blueprint. But it’s not just that products change. The rate of change encompassed in components, supplier relationships, and in the product market itself have made product management resistant to automation. This has led some companies to conclude that their products are just too complicated or their supply chains too dynamic for any system to manage. Many leading companies are proving otherwise with their quick deployment of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

Because PLM serves as the core product information management system, it complements ERP by synchronizing production systems on a single version of the product record across the extended enterprise. PLM also improves on traditional planning systems by linking project planning with project execution — critical activities for on-time and on-target project completion are instantly visible across your global supply chain.

PLM can capture a product structure before part numbers are defined, and it excels at tracking vast quantities and various types of data in disparate formats. It also provides early visibility to the impact of design decisions in areas such as cost, quality, and obsolescence — helping to avoid costly and time-consuming redesigns after components and sourcing relationships are locked in.

PLM enables the entire design and supply chain to track, document, and report on important details including design intentions, considerations, test results, decision rationale, and compliance requirements within the context of the as-designed product configuration. By tracking field improvement suggestions and providing suppliers a framework to communicate change requests, it allows the entire product team to better anticipate and react to events like supplier corrective actions and component end of life notices.

As the product definition evolves, PLM maintains the relationship between all the moving pieces as they change through multiple revisions. Everyone is synchronized on the current version and product designers can reconstruct the complete, versioned product definition (not just the BOM) at any point in time. PLM provides process support beyond the focus of ERP, giving product managers the change control mechanisms they need to ensure consistent review and approval and to demonstrate due diligence against various compliance requirements. They control the change process itself, instead of simply phasing the finished product into production after all decisions have been made.

Arena’s On-Demand architecture is designed for today’s distributed product organization. It provides an ideal platform to share information and collaborate across organizational and geographic boundaries. It supports today’s highly collaborative product teams, enabling engineering, manufacturing, quality, suppliers, design partners, and contract manufacturers alike the ability to share product information and participate in real-time project tracking. While companies might not want to grant suppliers access to their ERP or project management systems, Arena easily connects all team members to only the information and tools they need and links them into a central project environment where they can keep activities up to date and coordinate with the broader product team.

PLM supports product teams in the same way that ERP tools support production, giving managers fingertip access to current information and a common set of tools to consistently improve their results. But it doesn’t stop there. PLM bridges the flow of product information and changes from authoring tools (CAD and EDA) through to your manufacturing planning (ERP) and execution (MES) systems. And, by improving overall data quality for all product information, it helps address data issues that can impede ERP adoption and result in excess and obsolete inventory based on old or out of revision product data.

PLM Capabilities

Centralized product record
Arena PLM tracks comprehensive product information and history—including items, bills of material, suppliers, costs, quotes, specs, drawings, files, compliance records and much more—in a centralized, version-controlled repository. Because authorized users have persistent access to current product details in context of design and collaboration history, manufacturers, suppliers, and their outsourced partners make better, faster design decisions, develop superior products and more quickly bring them to market.

 

Collaborative workflow processes
Arena PLM manages closed-loop request and change order workflow processes across departmental or organizational boundaries. You and authorized users across your supply chain access the system any time, from anywhere, using a standard web browser and Internet connection, and get consistent support for flexible, collaborative design processes that support the way your company does business. And, whenever information changes, stakeholders for all affected parts and assemblies can be instantly notified to perform specific review and approval actions which are then tracked and added as part of the product record.

 

Advanced Product Analytics
Arena PLM provides instant visibility into product, project and compliance status and enables you to quickly investigate issues and analyze problems by drilling into Arena’s central product information repository at any assembly level, process step, or via compliance views tailored to individual reporting requirements. By providing users anywhere in the world a common framework and analytic toolkit, Arena PLM enables you to drive accuracy, consistency, and timeliness across product management processes — even if your product definition is highly dynamic.

 

Integration across enterprise systems
Arena PLM can be implemented as a stand-alone system or can be used to synchronize product information with existing tools and enterprise systems, including EDA, CAD, ERP/MRP, MES and CRM. It retains information on design decisions, issues, recommendations and resolutions for early prototypes and iterations, and keeps that information from cluttering up planning and execution systems while ensuring all systems share an accurate and complete version of the current product.

 

Tailored system and business processes
Arena PLM can be customized without software modifications to adjust the look and feel, organize information, and support specific design processes such as ECR, ECO, MCO, CAR, SCAR, and CAPA. You configure how information is captured and viewed, which users have access, what actions are required, when an action is expected, and even the numbering format—as many processes as required to support your business.

 

Security of product information
Arena PLM ensures the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of critical intellectual property far more securely than even the best on-premise systems. Our production network utilizes multiple layers of industry standard technologies (each proven to be the most secure in its area of application) to ensure access by only authorized users. Arena also provides complete failover protection using fully redundant, production-capacity systems physically secured in separate facilities and continuously supported and monitored by specially trained professionals.

 

Arena leads the future of PLM, on-demand
In the past, PLM capabilities like these have come at a high price. Traditional enterprise PLM solutions have been available only to large companies willing to endure hidden costs, risky and prolonged implementations, and disappointing performance.

With Arena’s innovative On-Demand technology, our PLM solution is delivered over the Internet as a service—it’s easy of use, hassle-free to adopt, and you pay as you go with zero IT investment. All you need to activate and use Arena PLM On-Demand is an Internet connection and a standard web browser. Now manufacturers of all sizes—from early stage start-ups to large multinationals—can immediately experience the benefits Arena PLM delivers.