Arena Exchange Facilitates Socializing With OEMS And All Their Suppliers

When it comes to streamlining manufacturing processes, OEMs know their supply chain partners’ primary point of contact have their own supply chain contacts that must be involved in all approval processes. It’s like that famous “I’ll tell two friends… and they tell two…and they tell two…” Faberge shampoo commercial. When a contract manufacturer (CM) needs to review and approve a change order, they often need input from a colleague or supply chain contact who, in turn, needs input from their contact— and so on.

Unfortunately, for manufacturers who export the bill of materials (BOM) from their product lifecycle management (PLM) system and then manually email it to their primary contacts, miscommunication—or no communication—can occur. This is particularly true when primary contacts disseminate it to their colleagues and second-tier collaborators, as contacts become increasingly disenfranchised from the original source, thereby exacerbating version control, process confusion, and product error. While OEMs want efficient supply chain approval processes, they don’t want to give their primary supply chain contact’s second and third teams access to their PLM system. But it’s happening anyway—only in piece parts. Far better to ‘socialize’ the entire BOM than to have it piece-mealed. What’s the solution?

Arena Exchange enables OEMs to share critical documents with their primary supply chain contacts without needing to grant their contact’s teams direct access to their PLM solution. In addition, Arena Exchange eliminates the burden of manually sending product record documents via email to each and every one of their own supply chain contacts. Exchange allows supply chain teams to share and socialize the original product record by posting it on a single social platform that can be reviewed by all supply chain tiers and all relevant personnel at each supplier. The benefit of socializing change orders/BOMs etc. results in a meaningful exchange of information that can lead to a virtual brainstorming session to improve a process — or a product. This accelerates approval processes and helps the OEMs ability to ship products on time with fewer product errors or delays.

With Arena Exchange, participants can review, comment, approve, or reject build packages. OEMs can easily monitor approval statuses and get up to the minute updates on review activity. Participants can also forward the build package to additional people for further collaboration and approval. During this entire process, the OEM, as the process owner, has complete visibility of all activity. Here are a few key benefits of Exchange:

• Higher product quality: Hold virtual quality meetings around specific products to identify defects earlier in the product release cycle. Early supplier involvement lowers the risk of product defects.
• Accelerate time to market: Clear communication to all supply chain participants of the latest release revisions ensures everyone is in sync and making exactly the right parts/assemblies for your product launch at exactly the right time.
• Lower product cost: Give all-access privileges to suppliers to help them deliver manufacturing options earlier in the release cycle.

Arena Exchange offers a flexible environment where OEMs can easily collaborate with multiple participants at each tier of the supply chain. Exchange is a simple solution for collaboration throughout the entire supply chain. OEMs who want to collaborate with many suppliers but don’t want to bother with user provisioning will find that Arena Exchange is the perfect solution.