Arena Exchange Just Got Even Better

Arena debuted Arena Exchange, a revolutionary solution that offers OEMs a secure, flexible, and traceable environment for collaboration with multiple users at different supplier levels throughout their global supply chain. Oh. And it’s agnostic. Any PLM user can use it — no unhooks necessary.

Arena Exchange immediately received accolades from analysts and industry experts. Here is what some of them said:

“Arena Exchange is the solution the product lifecycle management (PLM) industry has been missing and should be evaluated by any manufacturing organization wanting to take their new product development (NPD) and new product introduction (NPI) processes to the next level.” — Michael Lamoureux, Editor-in-Chief of Sourcing Innovation.

“Arena Exchange represents a paradigm shift in how manufacturers embrace PLM solutions to transform their operations and maximize business results in a competitive global market.” — David Heller, Publisher of MCADCafe.

“Arena…gives its customers the tools to help transform their manufacturing operations and maximize business results.” — Beth Stackpole, Editor of Desktop Engineering.

With Arena’s Winter ’14 product release, Arena Exchange has become even easier to use with smart functionality improvements and a major user interface redesign. Here’s a list of what’s new with Arena Exchange:

• Dashboard UI redesign

The new, modern user interface and dashboard makes Arena Exchange more intuitive and enhances the user experience.

• Dashboard folders

Users can organize product design collaboration into folders for improved usability. This combined with the new UI and modern file drag & drop functionality improves overall user experience. Users will have the same experience in Exchange as they do with other cloud file sharing apps.

• Sharing for freemium users

Users who sign up for free Exchange accounts are able to share and collaborate in the same way as users with paid subscriptions.

“While OEMs want efficient supply chain approval processes, they may not want to give more than just their primary supply chain contacts access to their PLM system,” says Steve Chalgren, Arena’s Vice President of Product Management and Strategy. “Arena Exchange allows OEMs to use any PLM system to share build packages across the supply chain without burdensome user provisioning, enabling more secure and robust team collaboration, resulting in better new product introductions.”

Here’s a situation in which Exchange could have helped:

According to Gary Kepp of Blast Motion, a recent incident in which a vendor had introduced a faulty part into his product designs nearly resulted in a manufacturing disaster. “If we had Arena Exchange in place, maybe that would have prevented the problem,” said Kepp. “Moving forward we are going to be utilizing more of Arena’s products for the simple fact that the products are dynamite.”

Today’s OEMs constantly face the challenge of communicating current manufacturing build data to their supply chain partners. The challenge is doing it economically. Existing PLM, ERP, and SCM solutions either do not provide the capability needed or are too expensive to implement due to licensing costs and effort required for supplier user provisioning. Key risks associated with poor supplier communication are quality defects, increased time to market, and increased manufacturing costs. Exchange fixes these.

Arena Exchange improves communication between the OEM and its supply chain. With unlimited supplier access, OEMs can ensure their suppliers always have the latest product information. Arena Exchange, which is PLM platform-agnostic, improves product quality, speeds time to market, and reduces product cost. Only the initiator pays. No licensing. No provisioning. No kidding.

Sign up for an Arena Exchange account today and start seeing how easy it is to share product data with your supply chain partners and turbo-charge your NPI.