Delivering Innovative Technologies to the Defense Industry

Graphic-Pacific Defense Logo

About the Company

Pacific Defense’s mission is: We are dedicated to the uncompromising application of MOSA standards and business practices to fully realize the US DoD’s goal of enabling rapid, iterative, competitive, and affordable delivery of innovative solutions to keep pace with the evolving threat environment and protect those who serve our nation.

Pacific Defense is a leading developer of C4ISR Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS) and The Open Group Sensor Open Systems Architecture™ (SOSA) aligned hardware and software solutions, Pacific Defense provides solutions for defense primes, military groups, government agencies, and commercial industries. With rapid growth, the company’s expertise includes electronic warfare, communications, signals intelligence, direction finding, and commercial wireless systems and services.

AT A GLANCE

SYSTEM USED

Arena PLM for AWS GovCloud

Best Thing About Arena

Standout response and service helped successfully transition from paper to the Arena system.

Bottom-Line Impact

A secure platform with flexibility and scale to support company growth and demands

Key Benefits

  • Secure cloud-based solution
  • Supply chain management with traceability
  • NCMR and CAPA processes
  • ISO certification support
  • Business process guidance during implementation

SYSTEM USED

Arena PLM for AWS GovCloud

Best Thing About Arena

Standout response and service helped successfully transition from paper to the Arena system.

Bottom-Line Impact

A secure platform with flexibility and scale to support company growth and demands

Key Benefits

  • Secure cloud-based solution
  • Supply chain management with traceability
  • NCMR and CAPA processes
  • ISO certification support
  • Business process guidance during implementation

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Pacific Defense began as an innovative and agile engineering company focused on turning customer problems into solutions, moving from concept to prototype at a rapid pace. The company has perfected research and system design, actively championing open architecture and standards so customers have flexibility and adaptability. Pacific Defense recently has applied adaptability to its own business model, extending its services into building and delivering technologies to the market. The move has paid dividends, with a recent acquisition by Pacific Defense and a growing list of commercialized products in addition to their continued custom design services.

During concept and prototype phases of product development, rapid-fire creativity and problem-solving are key. Control over product definition is minimal. “You can do a lot of the early-concept design work in small teams within engineering tools and, yes, email and spreadsheets,” said Vicky Orozco, Sr. Document Control Specialist at Pacific Defense. “We had a homegrown sourcing utility that interfaced with one of our design tools and everyone did things differently.”

Pacific Defense quickly realized that with the expansion of the company’s scope to manufacturing, people, processes, and systems would be needed. “We asked ourselves: What must we do to support this revolution?” shared Vicky. “We need to deliver these leading-edge technologies that have rapid change cycles to our customers. It was immediately evident we needed a single-source system, a product lifecycle and quality management system.”

With product commercialization came additional requirements, specifically from Pacific Defense’s defense customers. Pacific Defense needed to have a secure, controlled process for managing product, undergoing customer risk-based assessment audits, and demonstrating thorough configuration management practices.

Image-Pacific Defense SX-3000 CMOSS Mounted Form Factor

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We’ve developed strong working models of processes that now include remote teams—Arena supports all this with ease in a secure platform. Since going live with Arena, the benefits have been countless.

—Vicky Orozco, Sr. Document Control Specialist, Pacific Defense

THE SOLUTION

Pacific Defense had clear functional requirements for a system, including the regulatory compliance and security needed for defense work. While interested in a cloud solution, the team had questions. “We had experience on the team with on-premises solutions but were not as educated about cloud possibilities. After seeing what Arena offered in GovCloud, we knew secure cloud-based was possible,” Vicky explained. Arena met all the requirements and the response levels during the sales cycle gave Pacific Defense confidence, according to Vicky.

From Shipment to ISO Certification

Arena powers Pacific Defense’s processes today. In addition to product development and change processes, the team uses Arena for the shipment configuration manifest management process essential in defense sector work. Arena captures everything that goes into a customer program, explains Vicky. “Once shipped, we record the full product record, software revisions, documents, deviations, serial numbers—everything becomes a permanent record. We can transverse from serial number to program record and back,” Vicky stated.

Pacific Defense runs NCMR and CAPA quality processes through Arena and the team is thrilled with supply chain management and traceability through the product portfolio. Arena has also become critical to their current ISO certification effort. “The company had thought ISO was too big an effort in the past. Now, according to our ISO consulting experts, with Arena, we are halfway there already,” said Vicky.

Spectranetix Product Development

RESULTS

In addition to completing ISO certification, Pacific Defense will continue to advance their product commercialization. To support this work, they’re integrating Arena with their ERP system and Cadence OrCAD engineering design tool to fully streamline design to manufacturing processes. They also implemented a full supplier and contract manufacturing rollout of Arena to ensure they have real time collaboration across their global supply chain.

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We use Arena for customer risk-based assessment and audits with positive feedback.

—Vicky Orozco, Sr. Document Control Specialist, Pacific Defense