Embracing Enterprise-Wide Accountability to Be the Best

About the Company

Enphase Energy makes solar simple and energy smart with commercial and residential solar power solutions. At its heart, Enphase is an engineering-driven company and, early on, required systematic management of product processes. This requirement led Enphase to implement Arena as the product lifecycle management platform when Enphase was still a startup. Arena has grown with the company, and today, Enphase uses Arena to manage product development and quality processes both internally and across its complex supply chain.

Enphase

AT A GLANCE

SYSTEM USED

Arena PLM

Best Thing About Arena

Invaluable stability for processes

Bottom-Line Impact

Embrace transparency

Key Benefits

  • See status and actions across processes
  • Improve design for manufacturability (DFM)
  • Reach quality and cost goals

IMPROVING DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURABILITY

Enphase’s commitments to innovation, quality, and bettering the planet drive all it does. Its relentless pursuit of quality starts with the product development cycle in “design for manufacturability” (DFM) style. Using Arena almost from day one of design work has given Enphase a stable platform to expand its use of Arena beyond core product and quality processes to include other related processes and value-add activities.

To ensure DFM goals are met, Enphase includes contract manufacturers in product design decisions. The CMs get notice of relevant changes and, when appropriate, are involved in approval. The team also drives 8D and corrective action processes through Arena. And secure access to revisions lets CMs quickly execute on deliverables.

ARENA ANALYTICS DRIVES SPEEDS, PROCESSES, AND INSIGHTS

By implementing Arena Analytics, Enphase gained automated business process analysis critical to product quality and cost effectiveness goals. With Analytics, Enphase performs regular process tracking—to understand where the bottlenecks are for any change or quality step, track progress to avoid them before they occur, and drive to completion dates. Enphase’s Document Control center previously spent painful hours manually sifting data and connecting details to create the analytics executives needed – only to have the analysis be stale as data shifted daily. Now, the team is freed to focus on providing the human intelligence no system can replicate. “The time savings is huge. We no longer feel the pain of labor,” says Sue Gerssing, Document Control Manager.

Driving better quality and products

DRIVING BETTER QUALITY AND PRODUCTS

And, with the automated analysis, Enphase has improved its change and quality processes even further. Gerssing explains, “Being able to quickly see across processes and actions for who owns each, who assignees are, open statuses, time deadlines—this is critical information for us. No one wants to be seen as late on an NCMR or change now.” Enphase’s use of Arena echoes its push of energy solutions to be more—more intelligent, connected, and cost effective. With Arena, Enphase can refine processes and strive for the best in product, quality, and business.

Blue quote mark

Being able to quickly see across processes and actions for who owns each, who assignees are, open statuses, time deadlines – this is critical information for us. No one wants to be seen as late on an NCMR or change now.

– Sue Gerssing, Manager of Document Control, Engineering, Enphase