ALSO is redefining transportation through intelligent, smaller-than-car electric vehicles designed to move people and goods. Originally incubated within Rivian, ALSO EV’s combine vertically integrated hardware and software to deliver purpose-built mobility platforms that are more efficient, adaptable, and better suited to how people and commerce move today. With products spanning driven and autonomous applications, ALSO is helping shape a transportation future with less congestion, lower costs, and lower emissions.
Arena PLM and QMS
A cloud-native platform that supports rapid adoption, flexible integration, and scalability to grow with ALSO
Arena’s open API and automations make it easy to extend Arena’s capabilities and give teams greater control over product development without the time and cost of external resources
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Arena PLM and QMS
A cloud-native platform that supports rapid adoption, flexible integration, and scalability to grow with ALSO
Arena’s open API and automations make it easy to extend Arena’s capabilities and give teams greater control over product development without the time and cost of external resources
Innovation has always been central to ALSO’s mission. Although the company inherited deep engineering expertise from Rivian, it also inherited the challenge of separating from enterprise systems designed for a significantly larger automotive manufacturer. Traditional automotive product lifecycle management (PLM) environments often emphasize extensive documentation, complex release workflows, and multiple approval layers. While appropriate for mature organizations, those processes can slow decision-making within an agile startup. “Our biggest challenge was being a very fast, agile startup while trying to free ourselves from legacy systems and engineer more quickly,” said Sam Slack, PDM Manager with ALSO Inc. “That’s really where Arena came in.”
The company’s electric bikes (ebikes) feature a modular architecture, removable battery packs that power external devices, intelligent onboard electronics, and a software-defined platform designed to evolve over time. Rather than optimizing a traditional bicycle, the engineering team focused on solving broader mobility challenges through first-principles engineering design and vision.
At the same time, supplier collaboration was becoming increasingly difficult. Engineering teams relied on multiple file-sharing platforms to exchange product information with a global supplier network. Maintaining document control, version accuracy, and secure access, particularly across suppliers in Asia, created unnecessary complexity and increased administrative effort. The company also recognized that delaying formal product lifecycle processes until production would only make future growth more difficult. Instead, ALSO wanted to establish disciplined engineering releases, quality workflows, and supplier collaboration before scaling manufacturing.
—Sam Slack, PDM Manager, ALSO Inc.
After evaluating available solutions, ALSO selected Arena PLM and QMS for their right balance of usability, scalability, and flexibility. As a cloud-native solution, Arena could be deployed quickly without extensive IT infrastructure or administration. More importantly, the system provided the collaborative environment needed to connect engineering, quality, and supply chain teams around a single source of product information.
For Slack, Arena’s open architecture was one of its greatest differentiators. “Arena was at the sweet spot for ease of use and scalability. A big factor was that it’s SaaS and easy to adopt. Another big one was the integration potential and the representation state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API). We’ve built a lot on top of that.” Rather than forcing engineering teams to adapt to rigid workflows, Arena provided a platform that could evolve alongside the company’s product development strategy.
One of Arena’s greatest advantages for ALSO has been its ability to serve as more than a traditional PLM system. Using Arena’s REST APIs, webhooks, and automation capabilities, the engineering team has built custom applications that extend the platform’s functionality and integrate with existing business systems. These include custom notification services, engineering automation, data synchronization, and internally developed configuration tools that support complex product variants.
The flexibility to build on Arena allows ALSO to continuously improve engineering workflows without waiting for packaged software releases. “My favorite is the API,” says Slack. “We’re in an age where we can build things in a week that used to take consulting teams months. Being able to extend the platform ourselves has been incredibly valuable.” The company is also exploring opportunities in analytics and AI-enabled engineering workflows as its product portfolio continues to expand.
Implementing Arena early has enabled the company to establish scalable engineering processes ahead of manufacturing. Rather than growing into disconnected systems and inconsistent practices, ALSO has built a centralized digital product development environment to support future expansion. While many organizations implement PLM after complexity becomes a problem, ALSO chose to build its digital foundation before those challenges arose.
Arena now serves as the central hub for product information across ALSO’s organization. Engineering teams manage product structures, bills of materials (BOMs), and integrations across electrical CAD (ECAD), mechanical CAD (MCAD), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and internally developed applications. Slack said, “All of our engineering is primarily in two systems. We use Altium and 3DX CATIA, with some pending integrations we’re still working on. But generally, all of our product information goes into the Arena supply chain, which uses it as a hub and performs some actions externally.”
Supply chain teams collaborate with suppliers by providing controlled access to product information, ensuring secure document sharing, revision control, and complete traceability throughout the development process.
Quality management has also become an integral part of the platform. Soon after implementation, ALSO deployed several Arena quality management system (QMS) capabilities, including the production part approval process (PPAP), nonconformance reports (NCRs), and corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs). Suppliers actively participate in many of these quality workflows directly within Arena, strengthening collaboration across the extended supply chain. Jeff Hudgens, PLM Manager at ALSO, Inc., said, “Suppliers actually come into the Arena system and can fill out various attributes. It’s very collaborative.”
As ALSO begins shipping its first product, the TM-B Launch Edition electric bike, Arena remains central to the company’s digital transformation strategy. Future initiatives include expanding automation, deepening system integrations, developing advanced analytics, and exploring AI-enabled engineering capabilities to further simplify access to product information. For a company built on engineering innovation, establishing a modern product lifecycle foundation before production has created a competitive advantage.
With Arena, ALSO has built an underlying architecture that ensures an efficient and effective PLM system and provides a foundation for growth as the business scales.
*Note: Engineering first principles mean basing designs and problem-solving on fundamental physical laws, conservation rules, and basic mathematical truths rather than copying past methods.
—Sam Slack, PDM Manager, ALSO Inc.
