Overcoming Barriers to Successful Product Launches

Full transcript below:

Alaine Portnoy:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar, “Overcoming Barriers to Successful Product Launches.” My name is Alaine Portnoy. I am the Marketing Manager at Arena and will be your moderator for today. And before we get started, I’d just like to go over a few housekeeping items so you know how to participate in today’s event. So, we’ve taken a screenshot of an example of the attendee interface. And you should see a menu bar that looks like this on your own computer desktop. You will have the opportunity to submit text questions to today’s presenters by typing your questions into the Q&A pane of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation. We will collect these and address them during the Q&A portion of today’s session. And for any technical questions, just please use the chat option.

The presentation is now in full-screen mode, so if you need to exit full-screen mode at any time, you can select your viewing option from the menu bar as well. And please note that this webinar is being recorded and will be shared with you via email. So, I would now like to introduce our presenters. First, we have with us, Scott Reedy. Scott spent a decade working in engineering and manufacturing, helping drive new product development and introduction processes for a global manufacturer. Scott is the Senior Director of Marketing at Arena.

Also presenting is Jesus Lopez. Jesus is a solution consultant for Arena, and he has several years of experience positioning and helping high-tech consumer electronics customers optimize their business processes using PLM, QMS, and other enterprise software systems. With that, we turn the time over to Scott.

Scott Reedy:

Great. Thanks, Alaine. Appreciate it. And welcome, everyone. Let me start off by asking a question. How do you know if a product launch has failed? I think there are many things to consider, but maybe some of the keys to defining whether it’s failed include things like it hasn’t delivered a significant return. Maybe there were a few sales, cost overruns, or quality issues that would limit profits. The inability to satisfy demand, maybe you were launching in a particular window, maybe for a seasonal launch, and you missed that window. And when you have these issues, you’re likely going to see several consequences. Might be that you have customer satisfaction issues. You might do damage to the brand. You might even have if it’s a really bad case, consumer harm.

And depending on the seriousness of the problems, you might have a voluntary or even a mandated safety recall. And if the launch is a total failure, then companies are going to stop selling the product, and that’s probably the worst-case scenario. So according to Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, and he’s the author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that some of you may have read, each year more than 30,000 new consumer products are launched, and 80,000 of those fails. I’m sorry, 80% of those fail, 80%.

And so, with such high failure rates, let us consider some of the causes for those. So, companies today rely on highly dispersed teams and supply chains around the world. They operate in multiple time zones. They include contract manufacturers and a host of other suppliers, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 suppliers. And all of these groups need to work in unison. For high-tech and consumer electronics companies, we see common barriers to product launches. We see prolonged development cycles, where teams can’t get the right information quickly enough. There’s confusion about the latest product revisions, or sometimes issues with interoperability between electrical, mechanical, and software designs. And we see design errors that are caused by the inability to design, prototype, or effectively test the product, silos of information because the engineering, manufacturing, and quality, they’re all using different systems.

And quality issues come up because there wasn’t adequate testing or enough testing. And there wasn’t clear traceability to ensure that any issues that were found, that the necessary corrective actions were taken. You might have parts shortages, and that’s the inability to source either enough parts, or maybe it’s the inability to source compliant parts. Maybe it’s environmental compliance like RoHS, REACH, or Conflict Minerals.

And finally, you might have cost overruns, and those can be caused by any number of things. It could be from manufacturing inefficiencies, partner confusion, maybe excessive scrap and rework due to issues while you’re manufacturing.

Alaine Portnoy:

Okay. So we’d like to try to keep this interactive today. And we have a few polls, starting with this one. Please let us know how often you’ve experienced product launch issues, delays, or failures. And just check only one. Is it often, occasionally, rarely, never, or not sure? By answering this question and the other polling questions, you’ll benefit by knowing more about how to compare to your community of peers in your product launch success. All right, as things slow down, I’m going to close the poll. Thank you for everyone for participating. It looks like most of you experience product launch issues occasionally or often. These results are quite common with what we see among high-tech companies.

Scott Reedy:

I think it’s pretty hard not to run into something during your career, so that’s not too unexpected. And whether you’ve experienced product launch failures or not, you’ve probably heard about failures in the news. So we’re going to look at two of the more well-known ones that have happened in the last several years. And those are two rivals, so that’s Apple and Samsung. And we know that small companies sometimes deal with different launch failure issues, but no one’s immune. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a global company or a small company, you’re likely to run into this.

So when we look at the first case, let’s say Samsung and the Galaxy Note 7. It hit the market back in August of 2016. And right after it hit the market, there were reports of batteries that were overheating, burns, and explosions, which is about the worst thing you could have happen. And Samsung immediately began replacing the Notes with new devices, but the problem continued. So, soon airlines caught wind of this and they banned the devices for safety reasons. And Samsung was forced to issue a voluntary recall of the devices, and they recalled about two and a half million units according to Time [magazine].

In the end, they stopped production altogether, and that was in September, so it was only about a month later that they had to stop production and stop selling the product. And so they took a huge hit. The brand took a huge hit. And it was estimated that they lost about $14.3 billion. And some of the lessons or takeaways from that was that they had this great blueprint for their device, but there were tiny mistakes along the way, some testing issues. And this ended up being one of the worst product launch failures of all time, according to many.

And it taught them, and it teaches us, that we need to carefully inspect every aspect of product development. We need to make sure we’re testing the product, we’re gathering information before we go to market. And no matter what, don’t rush the product to market if it’s not ready or not tested enough.

So with Apple, they also had an issue with the iPhone 4, and it wasn’t quite as bad, but they, too, had some design issues that they didn’t necessarily test well enough. So they found that owners were having issues with dropped calls. They were having a hard time getting good cellular reception. And initially, Apple kind of denied that there was even a problem. But later, they investigated, and they found out there was a flaw. And the flaw was in the phone’s antennae. They had added a longer antenna, kind of ironically, to get better reception. But because they didn’t change the size and the form of the phone, they threaded the antennae throughout the phone, which left it slightly exposed on the outer edge of the device. That meant that when somebody took the phone in their hands and used their fingers to use the controls, it actually started to short circuit the signal, and the signal strength wasn’t where it needed to be.

There’s a lot of other product failures we could probably highlight. And some of you I’m sure are very familiar with others. But from our vantage point, the more complex the device, the more complex the supply chain, the easier it is to have product launch failures. And it’s important that everybody’s able to get to the latest information at the right time.

Alaine Portnoy:

Okay. And for our second poll, we would like to know: For those of you that have experienced launch failures, what were the key issues? Was it related to design, or testing, inability to source parts or product cost, manufacturing issues, supply chain partner issues, time to market, or you’re just not sure? Maybe your company is investigating a launch failure, or you’re just not sure of the situation. So we appreciate your feedback here. And once we get some feedback, I’ll close the polls. Okay. I’m going to end this poll.

And it looks like several of you have issues related to supply chain and manufacturing issues, and likely missing your time-to-market target, so it’s definitely familiar for us. So imagine if you could eliminate one, two, or maybe even all of these issues. And Scott is actually going to show us some examples of high-tech electronic companies that have been able to overcome these barriers.

Scott Reedy:

That’s great. And so it actually does highlight some of the things we just talked about in those two examples with Samsung and Apple. So, we have a few customers that have been using Arena. We have over 1,300 customers today. And we’re going to highlight two of those success stories. And the first one is Nutanix. And Nutanix has been a customer for many years, before they went public, and since they’ve surpassed the $1 billion in revenue. And their solution helps IT teams to build and operate multi-cloud infrastructure. It brings the enterprise cloud together for private and public and distributive cloud operating environments, so it’s a very complex solution that has electronics, software, and mechanical design pieces that have to come together.

And they had several issues that they needed to overcome when they were looking for a solution. And those were that they had a huge number in the frequency of changes to their product designs. They had a huge supply chain, and their product bill of materials [BOM] was an issue in terms of control. They had BOM integrity issues and they had a hard time making sure that everyone from their internal stakeholders to their suppliers were looking at the latest and greatest information because they were using spreadsheets and they were actually sending this information out via email. And so, as the senior vice president of operations once said, “We were building to rev A, but it was the wrong rev A.”

So they went ahead and with Arena, they were able to accomplish many things. But some of the key things that I’ll focus on is that they cut their concept to the cash cycle by 50%. And they were able to reduce their change approval process from days to hours, so that helps you to get your product out the door much quicker, obviously. And the vice president of operations, the thing that was most impressive to him was being able to kind of plug the gap with regards to those incorrect assemblies. So, he commented soon after they went live that they had zero wrong BOMs being built by their supply chain partners, so that was something that we felt very good about.

The other scenario, or the other customer I’d like to talk about, is Blast Motion, and they have different technology. Some of you may be familiar with them, but basically, they have a way to measure athletes’ mechanics and maximize performance. And it relies on motion-capture sensor technology that is attached to a player, or an athlete, and they’re able to measure and look at their mechanics, and then help them to improve their mechanics for better performance. So Blast had several issues as well. They didn’t have a single system. They had multiple silos and databases and desktops of information they were using. They didn’t have very good visibility. And they had a hard time communicating again with their suppliers.

This led to issues with their entire product record. And by product record, we mean all of your components, the BOMs, the approved manufacturers and supplier data, and all the associated design files, specifications, and other documents. And this ultimately caused them to have several launch delays. With Arena, they were able to reduce shipping delays by 50% right out of the gate, eliminate design confusion between their internal stakeholders and supply chain. And they were able to lower the manufacturing errors by 75%.

Alaine Portnoy:

For our third and last poll, we’re curious about what tools and systems you use. So, we find it interesting to understand how small to large companies share some of the same experiences as they grow from early startup and then they scale. If you could tell us what you use today to manage your product design and development processes, that would be great. So is it spreadsheets, email, some homegrown systems, or maybe some more automated systems like document controls or CAD, PLM, or other? All right. We’re getting some good feedback here, so I’ll close this poll shortly. All right. Certainly is interesting results. We did see a mix. A majority of you using some of the more manual low-end tools, and also a mix of some companies using systems.

So, it’s typical that companies would be trying to use spreadsheets and email because they’re trying to move so fast and don’t have the time to automate or streamline those processes, so they’re going to use the tools that they already have in place. And then some companies that are using document management systems or CAD systems, we see that companies are gravitating to leverage these, but they still have a hard time bringing entire design together, so that encompasses electrical, mechanical, and software, so that all the teams have visibility to collaborate in real time. This is interesting poll results.

Scott Reedy:

Great. And I won’t date myself by saying how long ago it was, but when I used to run [inaudible] services document control many years ago, we were in the same boat. And basically, we had a whole bunch of different systems. We were patching information to our worldwide manufacturers via email, trying to store things on shared directories. And it was always difficult for us to make sure that everyone was aligned and building to the right revision.

So the last thing I think I’d like to cover today before I turn some time over to Jesus is to talk a little bit about: What is it that we can help you do? What is it that product lifecycle management, or PLM, helps with? And it really boils down to this: The first thing is that you have to have a single system to bring everything together. You might have electrical CAD systems, mechanical CAD systems, software designs. And all of these systems are great, but they’re typically used by a workgroup, and usually, it’s the engineering or the electric group, the mechanical group, the software group. And those systems aren’t designed to bring everything together.

So, we want to make sure everyone has complete visibility and can see everything so that you have great interoperability between these different design pieces. And once you have information stored together, then you can do a few things. You can link quality processes to the product record. You can actually have corrective action processes. And so, as you identify issues internally through quality audits, or maybe external audits, or even customer complaints, if you’ve already gone to market on a product, you might have complaints. You can start to address that and home in and do your root-cause analysis very easily and tie it directly to the parts or the assembly that have been affected.

And now you’ve got everything together in one system. Then you want to be able to speed that ability to review things. So everything in Arena allows you to share information, put it through a review cycle, make sure everyone is notified quickly and easily. They can jump in through any web browser, and they can actually approve information. They can see the drawings. They can see the bill of materials. They can see everything they need to see to be able to evaluate the new product or the change to the existing product. And ultimately, that helps you to reduce that latest rev issue that we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes.

And finally, as companies today are having to deal with compliance, whether it’s environment, safety, or other types of compliance issues, you have the ability with Arena to tie into component database sources to be able to find out if it’s RoHS compliant, maybe you’re dealing with Conflict Minerals or any number of things. And you can capture that information through Arena so that everyone’s able to see whether or not it’s compliant.

So now with that, we want to see an example of how we can actually help you, and maybe just kind of run through a short scenario. And with that, I’m going to turn the time over to Jesus.

Jesus Lopez:

Thank you, Scott. That was a lot of great information you communicated. So from an engineer’s perspective, you might over-engineer every single part you’re putting into your device. But unfortunately, you might run into issues, either out in the field or issues you capture internally. Right? You might capture these issues through internal audits, maybe testing, or worst-case scenario, you communicated with that Samsung example—customer complaints—but you’re actually out there in the field and the device is failing.

So for today’s presentation, we have a fictitious company that manufactures smart wall units. We’re going to run through a scenario where we’ve identified an issue out in the field. They were overheating, maybe even causing small outages in individual’s homes. We’re going to run through a corrective action and show you how we’re doing a root-cause analysis to see why or how this issue came to be. And then we’re going to tie that to a change process, where we’re actually going to resolve the issue.

You’ll see a bidirectional linkage from quality to engineering, all the way back to the product record. You’re going to see how the whole team can collaborate and everybody’s on the same page. So with that being said, I’ll share my screen. So for today’s presentation, I’m logged in via browser. I’m using Chrome today, but feel free to use whatever browser you have of preference. We’ve tested and validated all of them. So I’ll go full screen here.

So as you log into Arena, your [inaudible] notification center, this is where anything that requires your attention is. So in this case, I’m looking at a change order that’s associated to that overheat issue. I can see I’m the first one on the approval workflow, and I can get more information as far as the items or summary on this change order, and more of that in a few minutes.

Over to the right, if I have an assignment, maybe I’m working with another individual on a project, new product introduction. Or maybe I’m involved in a quality workflow. I can see I have a deadline here for a corrective action. I can navigate that. All of that is captured in one location. I can also connect Arena to an email of preference, so I don’t necessarily have to be logged in to get notified. Arena also has a chat tool built inside the system, where you can have a conversation with your colleagues on an item, maybe a question around a change order, or workflow. Again, keeping everything in one location, moving you away from emails, this chat is actually specific to that object. And it gives you a link directly to that.

So let’s start the presentation and take a look at a corrective action here. So, this is a corrective action template that Arena gives you out of the box. Of course, you will have the opportunity to configure this to make it really specific to how you want to run your business, but this is the general user interface. The first section here, problem description, well, that’s very straightforward. But you can automatically assign this type of information to a colleague and enforce deadlines and have signatures when things or steps are completed.

But you also have the ability to tie this back to where the issue originated. So maybe this was an issue that someone caught on the shop floor, or maybe it was something that the support team wanted to escalate to engineering. They generated an engineering change request. We can see that here. There might be a file with an image of the issue. If you’re capturing these types of complaints in a different system, maybe Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, we also have an advanced connector that, depending on the level of escalation of an issue, you can automatically trigger a corrective action or a quality workflow of your preference.

In quality though, you’re not just building an electronic form to find out what the issue is or do that investigation. You’re actually able to link in the product record that’s associated with that. So we can see we’re having some issues with a PCBA. And it’s part of that smart wall U.S. version. You have some notes on the side.

Across the top, you’ll see the steps that need to be completed. Anything in green has already been completed. And right now, we’re currently at the corrective action step, which we’re going to go in a few minutes. But immediate containment, for example, can be someone on the shop floor, or a CM. You can give them access to the workflow. So maybe you’re generating a supplier corrective action. Give them access to the first or second step. There’s different options when it comes to that, and you control the access right here. And you’ll see that functionality carry out throughout the change order and also the product record.

You also have the ability to include approvals on workflows. So maybe you want your quality manager to take a look at this step or the form before we go into a corrective action. So the corrective action is going to include that change process that’s going to address the issue. We’re going to swap out a few faulty components, and we’re going to go into that in a few seconds. But before that, I also want to highlight the preventative action that’s going to follow that.

We’re going to update some SOPs, which might be, or which will actually trigger training to go out. So inside Arena, you can link, sorry, you can link items, SOPs, any documentation that you need to associate to a training plan. And upon a new revision of that object, it’ll automatically send notifications to all the users in a training plan, requiring them to go in there, download the documents, maybe take a quiz, and then electronically sign a read and understood form. And this is also going to trigger requirements, requirements for further testing and development.

So let’s take a look at that change order. So, as you can see, now we’re in the changes section. No need to necessarily select one of the rules or one of the features here to go into that. The whole team in the whole system is green. This is the overheat issue resolution. And we’re looking at the items that we’re affecting here. So to resolve this issue, we’re going to introduce a thermal fuse to help with that overheat problem. It’s going from unreleased twin production, and you’ll be able to control the revision values too, depending on the lifecycle phase. That’s all configurable.

If I want to do a nice red line to see what’s going on with this change order, select the red line. Now I can see it. I’m introducing the fuse, and I have all the associated information. So it’s a new part, it’s a new source, new cost information, and of course, a new drawing. If I want to see what we’re replacing, I continue to scroll here. I can see that fuse is replacing a faulty component on that PCBA. And I can do a red line with the drawing. So let’s take a look at the BOM because it also does a red line on there. So there’s that part that we’re replacing and the thermal fuse we’re adding. This capability is also available on the bill of material. So if you decide, or if you’re working with a contract manufacturer, for example, you can communicate this information. They can go into Arena, and of course, you’ll have complete control over what they see, BOM, different levels of the BOM, different items on the BOM, and down to what files they can see, giving you complete control.

But on top of that, you can include them in the change process. So you’ll hear Arena talk about how we help you centralize your documentation to workflow both with a value of this, collaborating with your supplier, so if I take a look at that here. If we’re working with an individual, maybe someone from this contract manufacturer, [inaudible] Technologies, they might be manufacturing that PCBA for us. We want to communicate that issue immediately.

This, by a click of a button, once I approve it, it’ll start the workflow, and they’ll get a notification as well. They have the ability to view, approve, edit, maybe write a comment back. But this gives you full accountability, peace of mind, that you’ve communicated that change effectively. And again, it’s all on one screen with a few clicks of a button.

To expand a little bit more on the workflow, inside Arena, workflows can be specific to how you want to run them. So for example, there’s different options based on change category type. That can automatically select the routing. Users can also have that be user-defined, so upon creating a new change order, the user will select the routing. As you get a little larger, some of the common things I see customers do is use a change analyst. So this individual will receive all the change orders, and then dictate the protocol that needs to be followed for it to become effective.

And over on the right, you’re taking a look at the approval requirements, and these are the options. They can be unanimous, one or more, optional, comment only. Maybe, just, you want to make sure you’re keeping everybody in the loop. Of course, in real life, this would be stricter. You wouldn’t necessarily have the option of one or more for operations. And we also see the quality flag. I’m looking at a change order. I’m also thinking quality process. And you see the step it’s currently in. It’s currently in that correct action. And we can navigate back to the quality view if you want.

So back on the items, on the change order, you’re also able to see “where used” information. So if this component is used on multiple assemblies, I can hover over this icon, and it’ll give me that report. But more on top of that, so “where used” is very important in any organization. But what if we’re developing a new version of a smart wall? As you can see, the issue was discovered in our U.S. version. But we’re also developing a European version that’s using that same PCBA. This change order, again, is helping you capture that change across all the assemblies that reference the issue and different lifecycles as well.

So let’s take a look at this finished code here. Take a look at the bill of material. So what you’re looking at on one screen is a multilevel BOM. And by the way, Arena’s always going to serve up the latest effective information. So whether you’re looking at the latest revision of all these parts or set assemblies, maybe any pending workflows over on the right, you see this is associated with that same overheat issue. Or maybe an unrelated quality workflow that might be associated with the top-level, but in this case, it’s associated with the box, to the packaging.

We had an issue with the safety label peeling off. All on one screen, you’re taking a look at any workflow that’s associated with the product record. You see any working modifications as well, and a nice report of “where used” knowledge again. So if you’re an engineer, you want to swap out a component, maybe go over to the right and replace that. That “where used” knowledge is going to kick in and give you the option to replace it on multiple assemblies, all of them, or just a select few if that’s your preference.

But you also have all the associated documentation to all these parts. So if it’s a capacitor, for example, maybe test results. If it’s a PCBA, maybe a schematic. All of it at your fingertips, and you can launch this directly from here. And depending, and that’s one of the benefits of being in the Cloud. You can shoot anything you want up there, regardless of format because what’s going to open that file at the end of the day is going to be the application you have on your machine.

And to summarize this workflow, we’re looking at a finished good. We’re in the items section. As you guys see, everything is going to revolve around the product record, change orders, quality workflows, maybe even projects as well. But here, you’ll see a flag, so if this finished good is part of a change order, this is another location where you can go and take a look at that. And we can also see that quality process there as well. Our revision pull-down that lets me go back in time if I want to take a look at what files, or maybe what source information, or maybe previous revisions that have occurred, different change orders. I can also take a look at that here.

And future developments, so we are going to update some test requirements, and you can go into this as well. So having your items, your change process, your quality workflows in Arena allows you to obtain a global perspective of how the business is doing. So what I’m pulling up right now is our analytics engine. So you’re not just storing this information inside Arena. You’re also able to report on it. And this is what I’m showing you here today. Product development, how are we doing? What are the open changes that we have here, and the average cycle time?

And this is giving you trending information over time, so you can see how the business is doing and making improvements to streamline processes even further all in one location. So with that being said, I’ll pass it back to Alaine. And thank you for taking the time.

Alaine Portnoy:

Thank you, Jesus. And thank you, Scott. We’re going to begin answering the questions submitted during today’s presentation. And as a reminder, you can still submit your questions through the questions pane in your attendee control panel. So let’s start our questions. And our first question is: Can you secure what types of changes or product information our suppliers have access to? And if so, how does that work?

Jesus Lopez:

Absolutely. So to answer that question, on a change order, you will be able to control who can see the information on there. And the way you do that is on the assembly, on the bill of material, on the part, on the document of that part, you have complete control over who you share that out with. So as you’re implementing Arena, as you’re importing items, you will have complete control over what you want to share out and what you don’t.

Scott Reedy:

There’s all sorts of things you can do, so they only see what you allow them to see.

Jesus Lopez:

Exactly.

Alaine Portnoy:

Okay. Great. Thank you. And our second question is: What if our corrective action process is different than the one you showed? Can we create our own?

Jesus Lopez:

Absolutely. So what I showed was a very simple template that we give customers out of the box. But under the setting sections, that’s the admin portion of the tool, Arena is a cloud-based multi-tenant architecture, which means that you can configure it without requiring any code. So it’s all click, drag, drop, fill in the blank. If you want the section on that corrective action to look a little different, you have complete control over what you want those sections to be, what the names are, what values you can select, pick list, multi-select, multiline text fields, maybe even free text. And on that form, you can actually include instructions to help your users fill it out as well.

Scott Reedy:

Yeah. And I think you touched on the fact that you could mimic an 8D process. So it really is configurable, not just in terms of the information that you manage. But what kind of a process or a review process do you go through?

Jesus Lopez:

Exactly.

Alaine Portnoy:

Okay. And the third question here: I saw training mentioned and wonder how training works in Arena. Does it link to the product details or BOMs?

Jesus Lopez:

Yeah. So inside Arena, anything you want to have under revision control will be an item. And an item can be a document, an assembly, a bill of material, a finished good. So training is associated to an item, which might be a procedure. And when the procedure gets a new revision, you might update that. You associate that to a training plan, and the training plan automatically recognizes that, upon a new revisioning event, it’s going to need to have the users in that training plan retrained on that procedure. And then you have options when it comes to that. They can download it and electronically sign, signifying that they’ve read the document. Or if you want to take it a step further and create your own quiz, which is another option. You can include multiple-choice questions if you’d like, force them to retake it until they pass it, or get a certain amount right. All of that is supported and all of that requires a signature as well. Great question, by the way.

Alaine Portnoy:

Excellent. Yeah, they are. Excellent. And another question: Can Arena pass the released product assembly or BOM into our ERP system once it’s approved?

Jesus Lopez:

Yes, absolutely. And that’s a huge value that Arena brings. So you’re controlling the product development inside the tool. So the way that works is upon a change order getting approved, that update automatically gets pushed to your ERP system. And there’s different ways of doing that, but we’re pretty much ERP agnostic because we have modern [inaudible] based APIs, or different adapters that we have that push information out. And we can give more information around that if there’s any specific questions.

Alaine Portnoy:

All right. And another question: Can I get information out of Arena by exporting data if I need to share with others that are not using it?

Jesus Lopez:

Yeah. Absolutely. So there’s different ways of pushing information out. One could be manually exporting an entire bill of material. When you’re exporting a bill of material, you can export the BOM source, file information, pretty much everything that I showed you on that finished good, you can export out, CSV, XL, maybe package it up via PDX. If you do want to use a PDX, we also have our own viewer that allows you to launch that PDX. And you can invite someone in a secure way to view that PDX package via email. And that’s another way of communicating information outside of the system.

Alaine Portnoy:

Okay. And I think we’re going to take one more question before we conclude our webinar. So our final question is: How long does this type of system take to implement and train users on?

Jesus Lopez:

That’s a great question. So we get that question a lot, so there’s different ways. And the answer is honestly, it depends. It’s going to depend on the amount of data you want to bring over. It’s going to depend on the amount of users you’re going to have use the tool. Right? But the great thing about Arena is that it’s never a science project, per se. It’s never going to take months compared to other systems to implement. It’s weeks. From my experience, what I’ve seen so far, it’s anywhere from six to 12 weeks. And a large portion of that is just making sure that the data comes over clean.

The setup of Arena is not very difficult. Like I mentioned, it’s clicks, drag, fill in the blank to set up the admin portion, where most of the time goes is around the clean-up of the data to make sure it’s concise and makes sense, your part numbers are in place and your workflows are set in. And it’s always a consultative effort. So Arena will implement it for you, but we’ll always ask and make sure that what we give you is what you want to see.

Alaine Portnoy:

All right. I think we’re good. And with that, that concludes our webinar for today. So if your question was not answered, we will follow up with you directly via email. And just as a reminder, we are recording this webinar and we will send it to you soon via email. So with that, I’d like to thank Scott and Jesus for presenting today. And thank you, everyone, for attending today’s webinar. Have a good day.