BOM & Beyond
Full transcript below:
Steve Chalgren:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Arena “BOM and Beyond” webinar. My name is Steve Chalgren. I head up product management and strategy here at Arena. Today, we have George Lewis. Say hi, George.
George Lewis:
Hi, everybody.
Steve Chalgren:
Then we have Isaac Liew.
Isaac Liew:
Hi, everyone.
Steve Chalgren:
We’re going to present a scenario around a quality issue from the field. One way to show off our product top to bottom is actually going through a real-world scenario that goes through a number of our different capabilities. That’s what we’re going to do today. It’s a little different. We’ll end the webinar with a Q&A. For full-screen viewing, make sure you click the top right corner arrows and your screen will get full size. Also, regarding questions, if you have them during the webinar, just send them to panelists by typing in the Q&A box, and we’ll try to answer them online.
If you don’t get your question answered, we’ll circle back after the call and send you an email. Make sure you have the right email in there for the registration. If you still have additional questions, feel free to contact [email protected] or [email protected], or for those of you that are customers, just contact your customer success manager or your account executive, who would be happy to answer those questions.
Okay, before we get rolling, I want to just give those of you who don’t know much about Arena a little background on Arena. Arena Solutions invented PLM in the Cloud in the year 2000. I almost said 2,000 years ago, but that’s not right. One thing we did is we built Arena from the ground up to be a cloud solution, so we’re fully multi-tenant. We were just discussing what that is here before the meeting, before we kicked off. Really, some of the benefits you get from being multi-tenant using Arena as a multi-tenant application, is our upgrades are seamless. We have a team that does monitoring, backups, all the infrastructure is all centrally managed. Then, of course, the scaling from all our startups that start when it’s just two users to our large global companies that come in looking for a PLM solution with thousands of users. The scaling is much better, from our perspective, being multi-tenant.
We have over 800 customers. We serve a number of industries, but our main industries are high tech and med device. We’re seeing a lot of customers in the IOT space that are maybe mechanically focused, that are building out innovative electronics teams now coming into the electronic focus appeal on the space. Our customers, like I mentioned, start off a lot as startups with just two people. GoPro started, I think, when they were what, 10 people?
Isaac Liew:
It was 10 people.
Steve Chalgren:
Then, of course, all the way up to large global companies like Medtronic, ThermoFisher, and other companies that you see here, maybe even have products like that at home.
Isaac Liew:
I know I do. I love my Sonos gear.
Steve Chalgren:
I have a lot of free light bulbs.
Isaac Liew:
There you go.
Steve Chalgren:
Arena PLM is really all about helping accelerate design and releasing your products to market. That’s our number one focus. We want to make sure Arena is a handy tool for you to use to capture the documentation around your items, your bonds, manage the change process, and get that product to market quickly without a lot of overhead. We also have a big focus, since many of our customers are high tech, they outsource their manufacturing. So, having a comprehensive and deep way to collaborate with all your supply chain partners, not just even your main supply chain partner, but even every tier in your supply chain. We have a number of products that do that.
Then, of course, what we’ll end up talking a little bit today about is the whole quality process. So, having a comprehensive CAPA—corrective action/preventative action processes—or other quality processes such as 8D, supplier corrective action reports (SCARs), corrective action reports (CARs), things like that. Then, of course, the last main section is around compliance. We have capabilities, enterprise, and partnerships for more advanced compliance directive management around rows, reach, conflict mineral, things like that. Of course, for med device customers, we are FDA 21CFR Part 11 compliant on all electronic signatures.
Okay, with that I want to just go through real quick on the solution suite. The top fan blade we call that, some people might think it looks like a flower, but I think it looks like a fan blade. Up on top here is BOMControl, quality, project, demand. We’re going to be talking about the first three in today’s presentation. Those are really the core business processes around getting your new product to market and actually handling quality issues, which we’re going to go over.
George Lewis:
Absolutely. Going clockwise, supplier collaboration, today we’ll actually talk about [Arena] Scribe. Scribe can be used for suppliers, but also employees. We’ll talk about how you can use that in place of your email inside the PLM [product lifecycle management] tool.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, and the one next to that, Arena Exchange, that’s one of those supply chain collaboration capabilities that is unique to Arena. It’s about that informal collaboration with anyone in any tier of your supply chain that you need to have right now. That’s one I’ll also take a look at. Then, like I mentioned, the compliance, lifecycle, information. We have a number of partnerships there with Octopart, SiliconExpert, which gives you a mashup inside your product of your compliance information.
George Lewis:
Those are great integrations. Business insight, we’re going to talk about this exclusively today in the way of Arena Analytics. It’s an exciting new product that’s been added to the platform. We’ll take a look at how you can use that to maximize the performance of your business.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, and then, finally, the last fan blade is really about integrations. We have a number of integrations to many different Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, different electrical CAD, mechanical CAD. Then, of course, we have a modern representational state transfer (REST) application program interface (API) for any other type of integration needs that you want.
Today, when we go through the presentation here. Oh, here’s a scenario I want to take you through. Basically, we have this GPS 350 is our product in our system, sales are great, product shipping. But, we’ll discover and we actually know about an issue around overheating and it’s escalating. Isaac’s going to take a look at that and as an engineer, he’s an engineer, to see how he can fix that. Of course, George will be the VP of engineering.
George Lewis:
That’s right.
Steve Chalgren:
I’ll be the VP of operations, I’ll be worried about costs. Then, in a demo, we’ll go through the discovery of the issue and launching the collaborative investigation around that issue like you would really do in the real world. Proposing the solution and actually implementing that solution with the supply chain partners.
Steve Chalgren:
Now, Arena handles the whole product lifecycle all the way from concept to end of life. This particular scenario, I want to point out, is really going to be around production. Someone could argue this is also maybe sustaining, but it’s really the production sustaining space. That’s what we’ll focus on. But just know that we have capabilities around all of it from concept to new product introduction and to end of life.
Steve Chalgren:
All right, with that I think we’re going to head over and George is going to start off the scenario. What’s going on, George?
George Lewis:
All right, we have an exciting scenario to play out in the tool today for those of you who may have never seen Arena before. But also those of you who are our customers. We’ll show you a bunch of functionality that you might not be taking advantage of today and you’ll see how you can potentially leverage that inside the tool.
With that, I am playing the role of VP engineering, Isaac is one of my lead engineers. We’re going to play out a scenario where we have a problem with the products. We’re going to investigate it and work together to solve the problem. For those of you not familiar with Arena, what you have on the screen right now is our production application. This is the site our customers are using as we speak. You can pretty much use any modern browser these days, they’re all good to go, validated if you’re in the medical space. One of the big benefits is you can access the tools from anywhere. As VP of engineering I could be at home right now, for example.
We could also involve supply chain users as another example. It’s very common for Arena customers to involve supply chain users because it’s cloud-based and you can selectively share out parts, assemblies, or workflows. Now, what everybody sees right now is a standard user dashboard. This is really useful for those of you trying to get work done on a daily basis. It’s a lot like your Windows or Mac desktop where you might save off whatever you’re actively working on. You can create folders and things like that but typically parts, assembly, finished goods, searches, that sort of thing.
Here, in the middle, we have our notification inbox. Commonly this is going to be things like ECOs, but today we’ll take a look at some other ways you can use the inbox for things like Scribe, quality notifications, any sort of notification in the tool will post here. It would also send to your email.
For those of you not familiar with Arena, the tab at the top will allow you to navigate. I’ll run through them real quick because they provide a great summary. Today’s use case really focuses on some of the extended capabilities. But if we run through these really quick they provide a great summary of the core capabilities. Items, parts and assemblies, request and changes, these are your change management workflows like ECR and ECO. Supplier and supplier part numbers and then your actual physical files and documents. Beyond that, you have a project tool which we’ll look at today for implementing a change order, sometimes used for new project development. Quality we’ll spend a lot of time on today. Typically used for 8Ds, CARs, SCARs, NCMRs to name a few.
Then, demand and reports are ways of analyzing the data in the system. As VP of engineering, this is a great way for me to jump into the system. It’s Monday morning, it’s actually Tuesday morning. I thought I’d come in here and take a look and find out what’s going on. It’s a great place to enter from. I can actually look at my dashboard here of KPIs across all the different aspects of what Arena can do and get a feel for how we’re performing right now.
You’ll notice things like, we have 35 in-process changes right now. Two of them have recently been rejected. I’ve got five out there waiting for approval. Drill down from here if you want. If you want to see exactly what those are, we can do that. You’ll also notice some of the other areas of product data that we cover. We can see ongoing requests for change, projects that we’re running, quality workflows. Each of these areas you can drill down upon. If you want more detail about some of these areas, we could take a look at project performance here. We have our own dashboard for that with its own charts and graphs. These are configurable, by the way.
Maybe item-based performance. If I were looking in here to reduce some risk, perhaps. Maybe I’d go after the single source report here, might be a good way to find some backup sources and reduce some risk in some of our designs. You can also see things like lifecycle status of some of the items and even item by category. Again, all configurable.
Now, where we’re going to start today is looking at the quality aspect of how we’re performing inside the tool. We can see we’ve got a number of open issues right now, some of which are resolved. We’ve got three late assignments. I’m going to drill down on that and one of the first things we take a look at is the fact that we have a corrective action here that’s currently late. I know that corrective action is important to get my product out the door and launched.
To drill down on that, we’ll take a look at that ongoing quality workflow. Here is the quality process in Arena PLM. This one is a corrective action request—you’ll note that it has six steps of the process. We can get more information, in this case, by clicking on the corrective action step. You’ll notice here that it’s in orange. Little bit of an indicator for me that there’s some kind of problem going on there.
When we drill down on it, you’ll see here, corrective action stage assigned to Isaac is currently late. I need an update on that. We need to get moving on this thing to find out what’s going on. I’m going to use Arena Scribe here to post a comment and let Isaac know I need an update. I’m going to post that and I’ll walk you guys through a little bit more of the capabilities. Isaac will show us momentarily how that will show up for him.
Now, from a quality standpoint in Arena, the way this works is each step of the process can have a form that needs to be filled in and can have associated information tied to it. This could be things like product data, parts and assembly, it could be photographs. In this case, a failed component. Can also be linked to outside business systems. A common way for customers to begin a quality workflow, or at least this is one of them, might be to link something from their CRM tool. In this case here, we actually have a case that was reported sales force. That could be a collection of cases in sales force that eventually get promoted by customer support team. At some point in time, we may decide, ‘Hey, we need to do something about it and promote it into Arena and send it over to engineering for us to have a closer look.”’ That’s actually been linked into step one.
Some of the other things you’ll notice here, step two has a different form. It was assigned to me, I completed it some time ago. Step three has a sign-off process that needed to be completed in order to move past that stage. Step four was a root-cause analysis that’s already been completed. On to step five, which we had assigned to Isaac, and that’s what we’re waiting for, step four we’re at right now. At this point, I’m going to break and change the controls over to Isaac. He can show us what this looks like from his perspective. Isaac, stand by, just one second.
Isaac Liew:
Great. Thanks, George. As George passes controls over to me, I want to mention that Arena Scribe will actually go ahead and send me an email from the application as well. I’ll get an email notification that I have a notice from George that I have something to work on ASAP. As I log into Arena, here on my inbox I can see here George’s message to me about this overheat issue.
I can actually go ahead and drill into that quality workflow and take a look at exactly what George is talking about. As I open Scribe, I can see George’s message. He needs an update ASAP. Let me go ahead and look at what he’s talking about here. I go down, I see this is a corrective action that I’ve been working on, I haven’t been updating it, but I’ve actually been working on it, and I actually have an engineering change order in process that I can go ahead and type into this quality workflow and get it approved through the workflow.
I’m going to go ahead and add this change order to the quality process so that everything is documented here. As you can see, this is an overheat issue that I’ve been working on and here’s the engineering change order that will fix that issue. I’ll go ahead and add this change to the quality process, and you’ll see this will automatically get tied to this particular step within my quality workflow. This can easily be things like item records, files, projects, whatever might be types of quality workflows to make sure that it’s fully stocked and it was in the system.
Next, I’m going to go ahead and drill into this particular change order to take a deeper look into it. Right when I get into it, this is a summary home page of this change order. This is information that I’ve entered in about why we’re doing this change and what we’re doing this change and some high-level summary for this particular change order.
Over in my file tab is all the supporting documents that go along with this change order. This can be a PCBA schematic drawing that I’ve been working on, data sheets that I want to include for additional product that we’re putting into this particular board, or any supporting documents that might go along with this ECO.
Open my items tab is where all the items that are actually being rev controlled. As you can see here, this is a PCBA that will be going from a rev C to a rev B. Here’s a new thermal fuse that I’m entering into the product. Let me go ahead and drill into the PCBA board and take a deeper look into it. Here on the summary spec page I can see some high-level information about this particular board, and you can see this is the current working revision that I’ve been working on. Once the ECO gets approved, will become the next revision.
Over on the bill of materials [BOM] tab I can see the bill of materials. This can be a [inaudible] and a BOM. What I’m really interested in is actually a redline view between the working revision and the current revision C. As you can see, in the redline view, here’s the new thermal fuse that I’m adding into this product to solve this overheating issue.
I’m going to go ahead and go back to the change order real quick. I’m actually going to go and fill out an inventory disposition about this particular board. What we’re going to do with the inventory we have on order, in stock, et cetera. That’s all filled out.
George Lewis:
I’ll jump in here real quick, everyone. I think it’s a great spot to point out some of the functionality for PLM for those of you not familiar with PLM or are just getting familiar with it. The game plan for what you’re going to do when you cut this over live into ERP is important. Not only is it about planning changes to existing product data or maybe launching new products, but it’s all about what’s the game plan? How are we going to cut in the changes on the ERP side? Exactly when is that going to happen?
What Isaac is showing you here is that game plan. We’ll take a look at, in a few moments, how I’m actually going to implement this on the ERP side. But, this is the game plan on the ECO that you can track. Sorry, Isaac.
Isaac Liew:
Thanks, George. Next, I can take a look at the routing that this particular ECO has to go through to get approved. Just an example, I have a simple parallel process between my operations team and my VP that will need to go in and approve this particular change order. I can add any number of different routing to this change order. As you can see, these can be multistage processes where I can involve different teams. I can actually have different types of approval requirements as well.
For example, I might only need one more approval from the engineering team or I might need a unanimous decision from the operations team. All this is configurable on this back end using point-and-click and drag-and-drop functionality. These routings are really easy to set up without the need to do any coding or scripting or anything of that sort.
George Lewis:
I think it’s a really good point that Isaac makes. Arena PLM is extremely simple to get launched and it’s all drag and drop from a configuration standpoint.
Isaac Liew:
I’m going to go ahead and cancel out of this. I’m all done working on this particular ECO and I’m going to submit for routing so that even George can go ahead and approve this. I’ll go ahead and enter my email, my password, and submit for approval. Now I can go ahead and send George a message via Scribe back on this quality workflow and say, “I’m done working on it. There should be an ECO in your inbox waiting for you.”
George Lewis:
While Isaac fills that out, I’m going to take control back. As VP of engineering, we can see exactly what’s going on.
Back to Arena. If we take a look at our user dashboard as VP of operations, I may have gotten notified through my email by the way. All these things can generate email messages if you want them to. What you’ll note here is under Scribe, I can see that Isaac’s told me he’s done, “There should be an ECO waiting for you.” If we switch over here to the action view on it, I can see that there are, in fact, a couple of ECOs waiting for me right here. The tool has notified me that I need to sign off on a couple of changes.
From an approver standpoint, Isaac really walked you through some of what you would need to do. Just to make sure everybody’s aware, as an approver I’d read through the cover page, I would take a look at the files that Isaac posted here. I would take a look at the items, the parts, and assembly that are on the change order. In fact, you can even do things like you could do a redline right on the ECO. Isaac showed us how you can do it on the part data or assembly data. I can actually pull it up right on the ECO if I want to see it here. Effectively, your was/is analysis.
Then, from the standpoint of what I need to do to sign off, I have my approval option over here on the right. We can approve, comment, or reject. One of the things I notice here, we’ve got a full bar graph here that’s already changed color a little bit. That tells me that somebody has already gone in and made an approval. It looks like it’s our VP of operations, Steve.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, George, before you approve, I want to make sure that you’re aware of the rework costs that we’re going to take on here.
George Lewis:
Uh oh.
Steve Chalgren:
I approved it because I think it’s the right move because we have a quality issue in the field, but just want to make sure you know we’re going to have a budget hit on that.
George Lewis:
All right, excellent. Let’s take a look at Scribe. Everybody keep in mind, Scribe links to the objects in Arena. You can have a Scribe conversation for your quality work, you can have a Scribe conversation going on for ECO, which we see here. You could have one open against a BOM, for example. Here we can see, concerned about rework costs for all inventory locations. Okay. We need to take a look at that.
For that, we’ve used an Arena project to manage the implementation tasks associated with this ECO. We’re not done yet. You’ll notice here we’re looking at an Arena project right now. But, what this is, is a great way of dealing with tasks on an ad hoc basis. This is one great example of where you might use it. The other excellent example would typically be for NPI, new product introduction workflows, that kind of thing.
You’ll see here, these are all the steps that I identified. I actually involved my supplier here. Jensen is a supplier user of the system. He’s already put inventory aside for this problem that needs to be reworked. We’ve got a rework estimate that’s been typed in here by him. We’re waiting for a couple of the other users to make updates here. I may know that we’ve actually completed some of these steps, so we’re going to go ahead and set the status to complete. As the owner of the overall process, I can do that. At this point, we’ve completed those steps.
What I’m going to do is go back to the ECO and post a comment for Steve here. Project, post that. At this point in time, I think we’re pretty much ready to go on this ECO. I’m going to go ahead and sign off on it.
Steve Chalgren:
I’ll get an email with that Scribe comment so that will pull me back in to take a look at that project.
George Lewis:
All right, I’ve now signed off on the ECO. One of the things you’ll notice here, if I go to the ECO status view, our change order is now moved. When Isaac was working on it, it was in the earlier stages here on the left. We’re all the way over in the effective status now. It means the change order is completely approved and every user of Arena’s PLM would now have visibility to the changes that Isaac had proposed because they’re not approved.
Incidentally, for those of you using an ERP system, we may have actually triggered an ERP integration at that point as well because the approval of an ECO can actually trigger the release of information to ERP. That would typically happen at the dash line that you see on the screen here.
Now, other things to take a look at here. Let’s take a look at our quality workflow. I see Isaac’s closed this guy out. He’s completed his work. Oh, wow, looks like he’s actually completed it entirely. If we scroll down here a little bit, I clicked on it from the ECO. You’ll notice it’s highlighting where the ECO fits in the overall quality workflow. Corrective action, step five, by Isaac, he actually just completed that so we’re good to go. He’s actually gone through preventative action already. It looks like the new thermal fuse is part of the ECO and will solve the problem. The ECO actually resolved in its entirety for us.
We saw it here how all these things can come together to really provide solutions inside Arena for projects, ECO, quality, and Scribe. But, to round this out from here, if we take a look at Analytics. This might be one of the areas where we go in and take a look. From the standpoint of how we’re performing, there’s lots of ways or areas we can look at. We are going to investigate the quality area. But, to point out for everybody, here under the changes view, this is where we could also see change order of performance.
I wanted to point this out because this is valuable for pretty much every user of Arena PLM. How are we processing our changes? How long do they take us? That kind of thing. We can see how many have been rejected, waiting for approval, but we can also see things like who’s the long approver, the long pole of the tent, if you will. Maybe you need to do some training for users who are a little slow to approve. Even things like task performance, change order, cycle time. Not only is the Analytics useful for looking in the rearview and seeing how you’ve been performing. We can also do some trend analysis here and say, “Hey, where are we going with this? Maybe we have a trend that’s going in the wrong direction that we want to take action on today.”
Analytics is a great place to both enter into the tool, but also wrap up with because it’s a great way of seeing how the business is performing.
Steve Chalgren:
Right on.
George Lewis:
Pretty cool, huh?
Steve Chalgren:
I think it’s wonderful and I think this is a wonderful example based on even some of the comments we’re getting. We’re getting a lot of comments, some of you have questions that we haven’t been able to answer online. This is a great example of showing how all these different products in Arena seamlessly work together to handle real-world case.
Definitely interested in feedback from all our viewers on this type of demo versus more of a product-focused demo. Also, we’re going to move into the Q&A part of the session now. If you have a question, remember to hit the Q&A button and type in a question and send it to us. Again, if we don’t get into it during the Q&A process we’ll try and answer it separately to your email or, of course, you can always contact your salesperson.
George Lewis:
I’ll let Steve take a look at the questions here. But, just to summarize what everybody saw here today. You saw the products and the slide you see here for BOMControl at the top. Quality, projects. On the righthand fan blade there’s Scribe. You also saw the product at the bottom known as Arena Analytics. We ran through a scenario that covered a pretty wide breadth of what the product can offer.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah. We didn’t really cover the whole procurement side. Obviously, if you change or throw a couple, you might want to run a demand scenario to understand how that’s impacting your purchasing team and what they need to do to get that on order, to get in your pipeline, to make sure that they are getting a decent price from their contract manufacturer.
They always get the best prices, but they don’t necessarily pass them on to you, our customers. You need to hold them accountable and that’s what demand is for.
George Lewis:
Yeah.
Steve Chalgren:
All right, first question. Is Arena Analytics available now?
George Lewis:
Yes.
Steve Chalgren:
Yes. That came out, what is it? Two weeks ago, three weeks ago?
George Lewis:
About two weeks ago.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah. That came out with our most recent release. If you’re interested in that, we do have a lot of interest and contact your customer success manager or AE, get that rolling.
Another comment, love all these associations through the different products. Great. That’s a comment on what we did. Here’s one, did the information from the CAR automatically populate into the ECO? No, it didn’t, right?
George Lewis:
Yeah.
Steve Chalgren:
I think we’ve looked at doing that between the quality and the change, but the reality is, the change order might be different than the quality issue. In this case, it was pretty straightforward. There was an overheat issue, it was a thermal couple. But, if you’re doing a scenario where you’re going through an 8D, the original case or reason for the quality issue might not actually be the thing that the engineer figures out is the core issue.
George Lewis:
Right.
Steve Chalgren:
It’s kind of tricky to have some auto-mapping because the reality is, the engineer might write something kind of on a different angle than the quality issue team. It might be multiple quality issues that are driving a change order to respin the board. In that case, it could be four or five different quality issues that impact the board.
Isaac Liew:
They are linked together to reassociating it with quality issues.
Steve Chalgren:
It’s persistent forever. There’s that quality tab in that item in that change order that’s available. You can always do a post-partum or post-mortem or an anthropological study to try to figure out how these things happened.
Here’s another question: Is this the only scenario? Do you support multiple quality processes?
George Lewis:
Yeah, that’s a good question. We do support multiple and it actually ships with three right out of the box. The CAR, the NCMR, the 8D. As a configurable workflow, you can create your own. You commonly see things like CAPA for medical device customers. Supplier corrective would actually be another good one that you typically see. It is very configurable.
Steve Chalgren:
Oh, yeah. Another question on the quality of products: I didn’t see a final approval on the quality process you presented. We normally have a formal sign-off at the end, is that possible?
Isaac Liew:
Yeah, absolutely. If you recall correctly, George actually had a sign-off process in one of the previous steps in the quality process. But, that can easily be at the end of it as well.
George Lewis:
Right.
Steve Chalgren:
Okay, here’s … Is the report cap standard in all work spaces? That might be actually referring to the analytics that we talked about today.
George Lewis:
Right. Arena Analytics is a product that you can have turned on for doing the charts and graphs. Every work space will have the reports capability and the reports capability is a way of just generating raw data out of the tool. If you wanted to pull data out into Excel or another business system, you would have the report cap doing that across all work spaces.
Steve Chalgren:
Here’s another one. A question around products and quality: Are those extra modules or are they part of the basic module? I’ll take this one. With Arena, you have the core product, BOMControl, then we have all these other modules that can be added, you can see right there on the fan blade. We also have packages in addition that can group these all together, if you want, for full capability. I think the best thing to do is just talk to your account executive and see if they can put together a quote for you.
All right, Scribe. Is it only available on change orders?
George Lewis:
Yeah. It’s actually available across any object in the tool. An item, which might get parts or assembly, an ECO, a supplier, a change order, quality as well, projects. Pretty much any object you see in the tool can have its own Scribe conversation attached to it.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, and another question to that, is Scribe built-in or add-on? That is an add-on module with Arena, Scribe. But it is built into our product, so it’s something that we have. Let’s see here, this makes me happy. That’s great.
George Lewis:
Here’s one on ECO: If it affects several parts of the assembly, can your report show how many items are affected? There is actually a view on the change order for that. There’s a view, it’s called the affected items view, and it’s effectively a wear-use report for the ECO that will show you every assembly impacted by the parts on that change order.
Steve Chalgren:
Another one on Scribe, I don’t know if you answered this one: All the comments, are they retained?
George Lewis:
They are retained. They’re retained in the Scribe conversation. So, in that pane, you’ll have a history of all these comments posted.
Steve Chalgren:
Here’s another one. How much work is it to configure Arena to support this comprehensive process?
George Lewis:
It’s pretty much ready to go out-of-the-box. The big question is, setting up a couple of your workflows in there. If you’re talking about from the ground up, most customers get started with the tool between six and 12 weeks depending upon your size. If you’re looking to add on some of these capabilities you’re already using today, that can often be a short-term exercise. It might take you a week just to plan your quality workflows and deploy them in the tool. It really depends upon your perspective.
Steve Chalgren:
Does it require any coding?
George Lewis:
No code.
Steve Chalgren:
No coding at all. This isn’t a consultant coming in to write code, this is just implementing and the customer learning how to configure it themselves and they can do it forever.
George Lewis:
Yeah. I’m actually glad you mentioned that Steve, because from a configuration standpoint we help you set up the tool, but it’s very easy to set up the system. The workflows, the sign-offs, the categories, all those things can be configured by you. Most customers will typically tackle that on their own once we’ve set them up. But, we’re here to help as well.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, I think typically, the person that actually runs and maintains the Arena system is the person who runs doc control.
George Lewis:
Typically, yeah.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah. It’s not complex. Okay, will Arena connect with ERP, SAP, and others?
George Lewis:
Yes.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, we connect to a number of ERPs, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite.
George Lewis:
There’s a bunch. ByDesign.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah.
George Lewis:
Sage products, MAS 90.
Steve Chalgren:
Dynamics-
George Lewis:
Here’s one. What’s SSO under integration? SSO stands for single sign-on. For those of you who have Active Directory from Microsoft, or any other LDAP provider, this supports what’s called 2.0. We can actually skip the login page. It would integrate into your corporate sign-on and the benefit there is, if you need a password reset, your IT department can do it, that kind of thing. It will really integrate the sign-in across multiple business systems.
Steve Chalgren:
Let’s see, here’s one about projects. You’re using your [inaudible] project for implementing a change, do people use it for larger development efforts?
George Lewis:
They do. Yeah, the other common use case is there are new product development efforts. If you want to manage the steps associated with new product development, assign them to the users that are already in the tool, it’s very good for doing that. It’s an excellent execution tool for really executing on the path and tying directly to the product data. It is commonly used for that, but many customers will use it for other ad hoc things because it’s very flexible. Today we showed the implementation task as one example of that.
Steve Chalgren:
Right, I think that’s one thing that we really focused on, on our project capability, is that it’s very easy to learn. It’s along the lines of enabling large teams and small teams to create a project, modify it on the fly, add the team members, and get those activities assigned to people. There’s a question here about suppliers, yes, including suppliers. That’s also in the quality process, too. We didn’t mention that.
George Lewis:
You’re right.
Steve Chalgren:
In the quality process, a supplier could even create a quality issue.
George Lewis:
That’s right.
Steve Chalgren:
They can create it. If they’re the owner, they can run the process. It’s full kaizen focused. It’s focused on delegating and self-empowerment. Any team can be running a quality process if you allow that at your company, including your supplier, and of course that allows the quality management team to monitor, be that traffic cop, make sure all these processes are going. But, they don’t have to be intimately involved in every single one of them. They can use that as a training method to keep the whole company focused on quality, including the supply chain.
Steve Chalgren:
Let’s see, what’s your license or floating seat?
George Lewis:
Yeah, there’s different tiers. Contact your sales professional on that, that is a main user.
Steve Chalgren:
A lot of requests about how do I get a demo or can see report analytics or step-by-step training or one-on-one? We’ll follow up with those people after the call. If you go to your customer success manager, feel free to call that person or AE, but we’ll make sure that you get connected with those people.
Here’s one about … Oh, one about validation and verification classes. Here’s a question about, would you require a validation or verification plan or report to release overheating change to production? How would you track that plan relevant to that change? Before you complete the change order, how do you link in this verification or validation plan?
George Lewis:
Yeah. The simple answer is, some customers do a document. They’ll link in a document and implementation style document or type a document. We didn’t talk about it, but the change itself is actually in a completed stage that will allow you to track. It goes along with it. That could include validation or verification plans that need to go along with it.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah, or you could use a project link.
George Lewis:
Sure.
Steve Chalgren:
Internally, here, we use Arena Projects to manage our QA process and our release steps with our development team. We capture those persistently in our system for each release we do.
All right, is there anyone’s that we have here?
George Lewis:
I’m sure there are a lot.
Steve Chalgren:
Oh, someone asked, touch on ECAD, MCAD integration. We have a lot of action going on in ECAD, MCAD. Most recently we have announced a new integration to Cadence OrCAD. That’s working with Cadence directly and EMA Design Automation. So, if you happen to have Cadence, I would definitely contact your Arena salesperson to learn about that integration. We have …
George Lewis:
Yeah, there are integrations to other [EDA] tools as well.
Steve Chalgren:
Yeah. We got integrations to all the major ECAD tools. But they’re going through a generalized improvement, so that’s happening now. As well as with [inaudible] listen for an announcement coming up with that. There’s another nice improvement that we’re doing there. Okay, I don’t know, I think we’ve got everything. What do you think, George? Isaac?
George Lewis:
We’ll go through the list afterward. If there’s any we’ve missed or seem more appropriate to follow up, we’ll definitely reach out to you.
Steve Chalgren:
All right. With that, we want to just, first of all, thank all of you customers for coming to this webinar. We have a lot of people here, a lot of great questions. Love to get a response on the format, if you like this scenario, maybe in the future do more scenario-based presentations. Also, want to thank George and Isaac for presenting this scenario and working it up.
George Lewis:
Great. Thanks, everyone, for your time.
Isaac Liew:
Thank you, everyone.
Steve Chalgren:
All right, take care.