PLM Perspectives: A Roundtable Discussion With Product Development Experts

Full transcript below:

Ann McGuire

Welcome, everyone. Today we’re diving into the heart of product development and quality management with our seasoned experts. I’m Ann McGuire, Director of Product Marketing, with over 30 years in PLM and QMS. I’m joined by our panelists, who were passionate Arena users before joining our team, so let’s explore the dynamic landscape of product development together.

Today, we’ll cover product innovation and market dynamics, collaboration among cross-functional teams, and product development challenges and opportunities today. If you have any questions along the way, please use the chat function. So, let’s start with having each panelist introduce themselves—let’s start with Christine.

Christine, tell us a little about your career before joining Arena and a little about your role here.

Christine Pompa

Hi, everyone. Thanks, Ann. My name is Christine Pompa. I’ve been at Arena now just about a year. I’ve been in manufacturing and quality for about 30 years in both manufacturing roles and quality roles, building processes from the ground up. I’ve been in consumer products, life sciences, med device, aerospace, and most recently, a food startup company. I’ve been using Arena for about 10 years, and I’m really happy to be here.

Ann McGuire

We’re glad to have you. All right, let’s bring Jair online.

Jair Aldana

Hello, everyone.

Ann McGuire

Hello. So yeah, could you tell us a little bit about your work before Arena and what you’re doing now?

Jair Aldana

Yes, so my name is Jair Aldana, and I’m a customer success coach here at Arena. I have over 10 years of experience managing and implementing PLM and QMS systems. I’ve worked for Fortune 500s and startups in regulated industries like MedTech, oil and gas, and food and beverages. I’m coming up on two years here with the team, and prior to joining, I was an Arena customer where I was a quality engineer and we implemented a full eQMS using Arena.

Ann McGuire

That’s great. Let’s bring Dani, our third panelist, up. Hey, welcome.

Dani Cordsen

Hi, I’m Dani Cordsen. My career, I’ve been in product for just about 20 years now in industries spanning from apparel and fashion into craft and CPD. I worked in various roles from engineering and product management all the way up to leading product organizations and implementing PLM systems.

Prior to joining Arena, I’d actually been an Arena customer for almost 14 years.

Ann McGuire

Great. Thank you so much. All right, well, let’s get into it. You’ve all had experience with a shift in market demand or consumer preferences. How did you shift your PLM strategies to adapt to those changes? And let’s start with Dani this time.

Dani Cordsen

Yeah, we’ve had a lot of different shifts in market that PLM has helped us work through.

Most recently during COVID, I was working at Cricket, which is a craft company, and we really anticipated the worst, and we were prepared for everything to kind of shut down and slow, and suddenly on a pivot, everybody started crafting. They had all this time on their hands, they were all at home, and our inventory positions were totally backwards. So, we had to be really creative on how we got our supply chain up and we really leveraged PLM to be able to onboard new suppliers in new regions to build existing products and bring money really quickly.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, oh, thank you. Jair, how about you, I think you have a story too with COVID?

Jair Aldana

Yeah, yeah. So COVID has had a big impact on how we all work with the shift of hybrid and remote work. So actually, I got hired during the pandemic. I came on board to a company, a great company that was doing great work to actually help with the pandemic. The name of the company—Xenex. We manufacture UV-disinfected robot that was helping during the pandemic to disinfect areas, so actually my interview process was all through Zoom and it wasn’t until I joined the team that I got to meet it. But having a cloud-based system was important for the business, especially as we needed to continue to run business to support demand and that was one of the big shifts in PLM strategies and really having, like I mentioned, a cloud-based system allowed Xenex to continue developing the robot, and I’m really proud to say even though I’m not with them anymore, Arena allowed Xenex to be agile as we were developing our product and they’ve actually become the first and only micro-bacterial reduction robot in the healthcare environment.

So, it’s really exciting to have a PLM strategy that’s cloud-based with the shift of market.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. Yeah, the robot is kind of cute too. I spelled it out on the chat for everyone so they could check it out. It’s pretty cool.

All right, thank you. So, I wanted to ask too, now, about collaboration in cross-functional teams. This is a topic that a lot of people ask me about, and so I wanted to see how you did that actually in companies.

So, what are some of the collaboration challenges that you faced and also how did you overcome them? Let’s start with Jair on this one.

Jair Aldana

Yeah, so for us, especially in the last situation I was in, one of the important things was, even though we were remote and hybrid, we still needed a system that allowed our cross-functional teams to still work together through our change management processes, through our design processes, so that was one of the things that really was a difficult thing to manage. But adopting a system like Arena, allowing us to still be able to continue working to bring our products to market and allowing us to also have that quality control, that’s really important.

One of the things that it also helped us, since we were all working remotely, as well as hybrid, it allowed us to improve our processes and really align how our people and processes were still going to continue now that we were not going to be face to face.

So, having Arena connect our PLM and QMS at one click away instead of having divided systems like a Google Drive, or a shared drive, or sometimes just working through email, allowed all of us to really have access to continue bringing our product to market, and through the cross-functional team collaboration.

Ann McGuire

I was curious. As a quality person, what kind of access to product information did you need?

Jair Aldana

Yeah, so one of the things was as we were not classified as a medical device, we were still going through our ISO certification. We needed to make sure that we had all our controls to make sure that we were meeting certification and regulatory requirements, so we had to have a project plan to develop our QMS system, and then we had to have our audit plan; we had to have our CAPAs, we needed to have all our design control records all in one system.

So having that and being able to do that in one system with QMS, manage that with our PLM, which is actually our product data, which is like our bill of materials, and how is it that we were designing our product and putting it together for manufacturing, those two go hand in hand.

So being able to, like I mentioned, having that in one system through our quality data allowed us to go through our certification audits, allowed us to have all our data so we could submit it to the regulatory bodies.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, you had so many changes with COVID, going virtual, and then also you were trying to get approval by the FDA, that’s a lot. So yeah, thank you. And now, Christine, what has been your experience with cross-functional team collaboration?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, so when I was in the startup world, most recently we did upfitting of Mercedes-Benz sprinters for restaurants, mobile restaurants. And being in a startup, we had to innovate our products and change market really fast, so we actually had to pivot to four different contract manufacturers over the lifetime of the two years that I was there.

So, it was basically building a plant from the ground up, where you have no manufacturing whatsoever. So, envision a totally blank warehouse and you had to put in the processes, the controls, the equipment, et cetera, to build these Mercedes-Benz sprinters, and without PLM, we couldn’t have even done that. It was really key in getting everyone on the same page to what was built and also changing so rapidly that you would still have people be able to follow what changes were coming and thrown at them really fast.

Ann McGuire

So, you had not only new contract manufacturers all the time, but I imagine it takes a while just getting them up, but then getting them really rolling, but then your product also had changes?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, because we were constantly innovating, constantly trying to make it better and make the equipment more efficient, and things like that, so it was an amazing journey. But without PLM, I’m telling you, it would’ve been a nightmare, there would’ve been no way.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Thank you. Dani, how about you, what’s been your experience? Why were you doing cross-functional collaboration and what were some of the challenges?

Dani Cordsen

Yeah, so especially in apparel, we have a lot of our manufacturers based in Southeast Asia and a lot of our designers are based here in the U.S., and so we were really leveraging PLM as our single source of truth for everything from product data, to how we were communicating with our suppliers, and how we were communicating with our teams globally. So, we were really fortunate in both the PLM tools I’ve worked in that we were able to use more of a tool for discussion as well as documentation inside the system.

Ann McGuire

Were they running, when did they work, the Southeast Asians? Did they work at the normal time or did they have to come in early to meet with you?

Dani Cordsen

We had a lot of weird call times for everybody, but we really did leverage notifications. Arena specifically has a scribe function, it’s more like an email connected to a product, and that we found really helped us to collaborate and get all of our teams on the same page, pulled everything out of Teams and Outlook, and off of WeChat and text messages, and put it all into one spot so everybody could figure out what was going on with the product.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, I love Scribe. I know I’m crazy about Scribe just for this exact reason. And also, when there are so many channels, who knows, who said what? I know I personally don’t know if someone emailed me, or Teams me, or what, but if we know it’s about product, it’s in Scribe, that’s easier to keep track of.

Well, thank you. Let’s see, next we wanted to talk about scaling your PLM system. So, Dani, your company has grown with PLM, and I wanted to ask you about that. What did you do with your PLM system as it scaled?

Dani Cordsen

Yeah, I’ve been actually really lucky to work in two startups that turned into pretty large corporations. So, with both Crocs and Cricket, we had to figure out how to scale everything we were doing. From month to month the business dynamic was changing so much that we had to be able to be flexible in how we grew the business, and especially, really prior to having PLM, we weren’t able to scale effectively and so we had a lot of extra work being done and it took us longer to get to market.

And implementing PLM, bringing it into the fold, really helped us to scale our business and our teams, so we were able to leverage best practices and implement what we did on one product, and transitioning it across different suppliers, we were able to consolidate our material libraries and understand better what was going on with costing, all because we were able to put everything into one place and then grow within that system pretty simply without a lot of extra work.

Ann McGuire

Oh, I’m muted, I’m muted. Can you hear me? Oh, I just got a message that said, “You are muted.”

So I was wondering too, when you were growing, bringing people up to speed, I’ll just say it, I think if you don’t have a single source of truth, if you have tribal knowledge, some things are on Jim’s PC and some things are in Christine’s engineering notebook, it’s hard to onboard people.

Dani Cordsen

And we’ve definitely had instances that I’ve been a part of where the wrong information was communicated to suppliers or the wrong information was communicated to marketing because product data wasn’t consolidated.

So as an example, I went into one of my large craft retailers, walked down the aisle, found a product that was listed as a removable product, it wouldn’t damage your walls—definitely NOT removable, but the product data hadn’t been communicated effectively because we were running so fast so that the product information was scattered, and really we were able to correct a lot of that as we grew into PLM and scaled that way.

Ann McGuire

Oh my God. So, helping make people’s lives easier, especially people with a lot of changes in their lives, changes in growth.

Let’s see. So, I also wanted to ask, so our next question has to do with PLM. So, what are some common challenges and opportunities for improvements in product development today?

I’ll start with Christine on this one.

Christine Pompa

Sure. So, one of the biggest challenges that I’ve always faced is how do you get your R&D team to still be creative, yet get them to follow a process?

So, I think having a PLM system or a QMS system that you can give them an overall process and guideline without stifling their creativity is really key and beneficial, because I know they love to create, they don’t want to bother with all the documentation that follows it, but we as production and quality people need to have that structure and documentation so we can then move it into something that’s viable, manufacturable, and consistent.

So, I think that that’s some of the challenges, but you can do that really well in a PLM system like Arena. We built out templates and things like that and invited our R&D folks in so that they could document what they needed to document but still have the ability to go off and create what they needed to create.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Oh, that’s great, because you don’t want to stifle that, you don’t want to stifle the innovative people that are doing those great things.

Let’s go to Jair, so similar question, what are some challenges and opportunities in product development today?

Jair Aldana

Yeah, so for me, I’m pretty sure a lot of the people that have gone through implementing a product development strategy to relate is really getting buy-in for adoption of a single source of truth system to manage your product development. Sometimes it’s hard to choose because everybody wants to choose their own systems. Like for example, engineers want to use their CAD system, other teams want to use PLM, some of the marketing team wants to use CRM.

So just being able to really pick a single source of truth system to actually manage your product development, and from industry standard best practice, from all my experience in industry, PLM is really the center and core of, really, your single source of truth.

But once you bypass that challenge of getting buy-in, is where all the opportunity comes in because then now you’re able to really bring all your processes because each team interacts with PLM differently. Your engineering team is bringing in their design; your production team is bringing in their bill of materials, your manufacturing bill of materials, and how they’re going to be manufacturing; quality is going to bring in their SOPs, work instructions, manuals; then the quality team is going to be able to bring in their quality processes; marketing could bring in their marketing.

So, once you define that, you’re allowing the structure of building your process improvement processes and start discussing how to launch your product development, and really at the end of the day, when that happens, it speeds up your product-to-market efficiency with more control and reliability. That’s been something that I’ve experienced a lot.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. When you said marketing information, like packaging or what kind of things would you put in there?

Jair Aldana

Yeah, I have IFUs, DFUs. Especially when you’re in the medical device industry, it’s very critical that the instructions and the guides, and that actually matches your marketing material, because marketing is marketing the product itself as what the product could do and what is the function of it from the marketing standpoint.

But also at the product standpoint, what you’re saying your product’s doing from you marketing it, has to actually be something that is actually global and has to be packaged, sometimes even labeled within it. So marketing, and design, and production altogether have to interact, and PLM, and that’s why I mentioned having the single source of truth system—really allows that to be controlled.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, totally. Yeah, good. So yeah, I think too with these integrations, single source of truth, I always like to say single source of truth for product information because when people start jerry-rigging their CRM system to manage product, it’s like keep your customer things in your customer resource management, that’s the single source of truth for that, and then even ERP, sometimes we say, “Well, our source of truth for bill of material is ERP.” Well, does ERP have history? Do you manage the ECOs? Are your engineers in the ERP system? Hopefully not, but ERP knows inventory cost, those kinds of things.

So great, yeah, I love that, it’s so important.

Jair Aldana

When you’re in a team and everybody has their flavor or their thoughts, it’s just like, I’m pretty sure all of us could agree to that, right? Those discussions are fun, but at the end of the day, PLM has, from my experience in all the companies I’ve worked in, been that pillar.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Christine, did you face that at all? With you, we were talking about the development in PLM. What about PLM to the operations or your contract manufacturers? How did you manage that?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, we had it set up where we invited our contract manufacturers in to participate in our changes, so it really worked well because it didn’t go into a black hole where you’re hoping somebody went and told our contract manufacturers, “Hey, go do this,” or “Hey, go do that.” We actually set it up where we had them participate, but we also had them specifically assigned out tasks that they had to accomplish and complete, and we monitor those just to make sure that we stayed on top of what was going on because we couldn’t be there on site 24/7 to make sure that they were incorporating everything.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, that’s so good. So, when you said be involved with it or participate in it, do you mean reviewing even?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, we had them actually review, approve, just to make sure, because a lot of our contract manufacturers in the process that we were using, we had to rely on them because they knew the vehicle part of it a little better, whereas we knew what we wanted to build a little bit better, so you had to lean on them a lot. It was really interesting; it was an interesting scenario and case.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, it sounds very collaborative.

Christine Pompa

Yeah, yeah.

Ann McGuire

Well, that’s cool.

Dani Cordsen

When we pulled in our contract manufacturers, that was a game changer for us, it really was. Everybody, there was no more hidden BOM, there was no more confusion on the manufacturing process, it was all so clearly documented, and it really helped us go a lot faster as we were innovating too.

I hope that was your experience as well, Christine.

Ann McGuire

Did your supply chain partners ever have ideas on how to improve yields or how to get to that point, how to improve? Is there anything you can share there? I don’t know, I just think that they’re the experts in manufacturing the product, so I feel like they would have ideas.

Dani Cordsen

It was actually really powerful. We were able to give them the ability to empower them to be a partner instead of a contract manufacturer. So, it really gave us more of a partnership than it was a traditional manufacturing relationship where our contract manufacturers were able to go in and say through request, through documented request, “Here’s what we want to do, here’s why we want to do it, and what would be impacted.” And then we could have discussion and track what we were doing and then implement it all in one workflow.

Ann McGuire

That’s awesome.

Christine Pompa

Yeah, same. And the thing that I like, Dani, to spin off of that, was through the different permissions you could give a partner versus a supplier. You could have the partner really truly be a partner that would come in and do exactly what you said, but you could have your supplier, like nut, bolt, things like that, capacitor, PC board, they would just come in and be a part of just the supply chain piece of it, but you didn’t have to worry that, again, your supply chain didn’t have to go and email a bunch of files to the suppliers.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. And also, everyone’s participating. When should we say supply chain collaboration, some of it’s supply chain communication, but then there’s the powerful supply chain collaboration.

Did you work with the contract manufacturers much, Jair, in your role? I think Jair might be frozen. Oh, no, here you go.

Jair Aldana

Yeah. So, one of the things was that they didn’t have a relationship with our contract manufacturer, but it was decided that we were just going to be able to help them export. So, we didn’t bring them into our system, that was a business decision made, but I was really pushing for that because that is an ability that we have within the system. But then again, that’s the nice thing about it, you can make that business decision whether you want to bring in your suppliers or not, so we didn’t have that experience.

Ann McGuire

I was wondering, actually … Oh, go ahead.

Jair Aldana

I just want to mention, I have dealt with other tools with other companies where we did have to send the drawings to the manufacturer and we didn’t have that ability in those particular tools.
I’m a customer success coach, so when I talk to my customers and they really come on board and they know about that, that’s super exciting. Right now, just hearing Christine and Dani’s stories, I’m like, “That’s the typical.” And when we hear that customers are excited to be able to not only just to share, but have that partnership with your CMs.

Ann McGuire

Okay, that’s what I was going to ask you about. We were talking about the past. I was wondering in your current roles in customer success, if you see this quite a bit or if you want to comment on that? Either one of you, Christine, do you want to talk about any of your customers? Are they collaborating with that?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, It’s kind of amazing. I love it because manufacturing it is different in different industries, but you see kind of the same issues, and the same problems, and the same challenges, I guess.
And overcoming them and working to try to help kind of strategize on how to overcome them, I think is really exciting. But yeah, you’re absolutely right as you see the same things in different fields, even though they’re totally different products.

Ann McGuire

No matter what, as long as you’re outsourcing something, I mean, we’re talking about manufacturing, but whatever you’re outsourcing, that company ends up being the expert in whatever they’re doing.
So anyway, thanks.

Dani Cordsen

I’ve worked in a couple of different tools, and I have to just add a plug for a second that the coaches are truly phenomenal with Arena in bringing best practices to the table that I had never considered.
So being in the fashion apparel industry and then leveraging best at practices from the electronics industry was something really unique that I was able to gain out of it, and our PLM system enabled us to do that, in partnership with our coaches too.

Ann McGuire

Great. Dani, I didn’t get to you really on this question. I know you had some things to add about the common challenges and opportunities in product development. Did you have anything to add?

Dani Cordsen

Yeah, we found that one of the greatest opportunities we had was in cost savings and understanding how our supply chain was leveraged appropriately.
So, once we started actually getting all of our documentation going from paper into systems, that was one of our greatest challenges, is understanding where were we able to tighten up? Where were we able to get better margin and pass it on to our customers? And getting everything into one spot so that we could leverage that system to understand what was happening was truly a game changer for us.

Ann McGuire

Great, thank you. Let’s see, we actually had a question, I might duck in with a question here because it is kind of related to what we’re talking about now, and by the way, keep the questions coming because we love it. It has to do with ERP integrations.
“So, I’d like to hear about what ERP systems everyone used and how well the collaboration worked. We currently have SAP Business ByDesign and linking between Arena and it concerns me a bit.”
This is a super interactive form, if you want to add more, you can, but does someone want to talk about how you went about integrating with an existing ERP system? And, I don’t know, has anyone used SAP ByDesign in our group or has a customer who has? Yeah. No.

Christine Pompa

I have not, but I have had customers that have had SAP, but I’ve implemented it, like I said, in my last two companies, and we’ve had two different ERP packages.
One was NetSuite and one was Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics, and D365, and we used the third-party integrator partners to help us integrate.
What I’ve found is once you get what you want to accomplish in the mapping and that’s set over, I think the actual integration piece of it, it’s pretty easy. It’s just figuring out what is it do you want to map?
What do you want to use? How do you want to leverage the data? And what kind of support do you want to provide your ERP so that Arena pushes the correct information to your ERP package so that you can make your good business decisions?

Ann McGuire

When we say single source of truth, it’s the source of truth for item master, bill of material. SAP is still going to be the source of truth for inventory, reorders, that kind of a thing.
Does anyone else want to pitch in on ERP integrations? So, what’s really common, and we do have an integration with ERP.

Jair Aldana

For me, a lot the customers that I would see …

Ann McGuire

Jair, you’re kind of frozen. You are frozen. I’ll talk until you come on.

Jair Aldana

I’m freezing up. Can y’all hear me now?

Ann McGuire

Yeah.

Jair Aldana

Can y’all hear me?

Ann McGuire

Yes. I think he can’t hear us.

Jair Aldana

No, I can hear.

Ann McGuire

Okay.

Jair Aldana

I’ll stop for now because I don’t know what’s going on, if it’s my internet connection or what, because my machines acting up, so I’ll take five for a second.

Ann McGuire

Okay. All right. Yeah, maybe it’ll catch up. So, we do have an integration with SAP through our partner PROSTEP, and the integration at least goes from Arena to SAP with item master and bill of material, and bill of material changes and item master changes, but then what’s optional with some of these integrations is the ability to update Arena with, we call them like supply chain information, so like a cost, inventory. So, if an engineer is getting ready to make a change, they have an idea of how much inventory is on hand if they’re trying to pull a subassembly off a part, something like that. You can have that information all in one place, but that’s an option.

Yeah. Jair, you’re looking a lot better now.

Jair Aldana

Yeah, I’m back, I’m back on.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, a lot more alive.

Jair Aldana

I think it’s my internet connection, I apologize for that. So yeah, I myself when I was a customer, we didn’t have but we were exploring the integration, and that’s one of the great things that it’s available that we found out that there’s integration partners, there’s actually a marketplace where we could look into it.

And when we were evaluating, we were evaluating NetSuite, and some of the customers that I’m working with, a lot of them have that NetSuite integration, and one of the great things about it is that you could do a bidirectional connection between the two because we were talking about your design as designed is your PLM single social truth but your manufacturing is your ERP, your inventory. And one of the critical things is whenever you’re working with a medical device, you want to know the way it was built and at the moment in time, and ERP really allows you to be able to capture the way it was manufactured through being able to pull work order at that moment in time of how that bill of material looked, and all the quantities depleted in bringing it into production and vice versa, once you’re making updates, whether you’re bringing data from the supply chain, whether you’re changing a supplier, you could bring that data back into Arena.

So, having the capability of building the structure, the main thing, it just becomes on the requirements, what kind of data is it that you want to feed into each other’s systems? And like I said, the great thing is our partners help with that integration and really help you develop that connection, and I’ve heard good feedback from our customers on that.

Ann McGuire

And of course, the big benefit of doing that, I’m sure he’ll be back, the big benefit of making that integration. If you’re wondering, “Oh, is our operations going to be upset about integrating with SAP?” Operations likes getting accurate information faster than usual, so it’s a big win for the SAP system too.

Okay, let’s see, I had one more question for you, which was, and we hit some of these points, but we’ll start with Jair this time, while you’re still here, Jair. Based on your experience with this and other PLM systems, what is some advice on things our audience should consider when evaluating a PLM or QMS system?

Jair Aldana

So, one of the key things that I found through my experience has been when you’re evaluating a system, sometimes you’re just looking at what you’re trying to accomplish at that moment, whether it’s like you’re trying to get your design, or you’re trying to get your product data, or your ERP, but one of the things that’s important for evaluating a PLM system is a system that could scale, because at the beginning you might only need PLM, so you want a system that has the ability to interconnect with other systems.

So, one of the things would be having the rest API connectivity that allows for either your internal team or an integration team to come in and really connect you to the digital thread as we know. The digital thread starts from design. Sometimes there’s an ALM tool to your CAD team, to your PLM, to your ERP, CRM. So maybe at the beginning you might not need all those tools, but you do want to consider that the tool that you are picking has the capability to scale as your business starts growing from maybe startup, to midsize, to hopefully the next Fortune 500 company.

Another thing, also, I think it’s important is that to pick a solution that really has support besides just implementation. A lot of times we pick a tool based on the features, but how are we going to scale? Is there a support plan for it, right? Is there a team that’s going to help me? It’s going to be more like a partnership than just like we sold you a tool and then now you’re off on your own, and that’s one thing to evaluate.

And then being able to really go in and research, there’s a lot of ways to research now in place. And lastly, one of the things that I know that when I was in implementation teams and we were trying to figure out what tool we wanted to pick, was a tool that was going to allow us to not only scale, but also a tool that’s going to be continuously improving as changes come in the market. Right now, we’re seeing there’s a lot of different dynamics with remote work, with security, with AI, so a company that is going to be able to support the different changes through technology.

Ann McGuire

Right, good. Yeah, great points. Having Dani, so Dani’s on our product team, Christine and Jair, they’re customer coaches on our customer success team. This is one thing is, yeah, you don’t want to just look at the product, you want to look at who’s behind the product. Let’s see, I think, Christine, what are some of your tips on when you’re evaluating a PLM company, what should you be doing?

Christine Pompa

Sure, I think Jair was spot on. You want to be able to scale, you want to be able to make sure that you have a good support team, as well as making sure that the platform grows with the field. But I think one thing that was really important to me was getting something simple enough that I could do it myself or I could have someone on my team do it and make the configuration changes to the platform as my business changed, because our businesses aren’t stagnant, they’re continuously growing, and evolving, and changing.

So, the one thing that was important when I was looking and when we were evaluating was—do I have to hire someone just to go and do programming, just to make a change, and adding an attribute or changing a category or something like that, or is it something that me or a bunch of people that are in my company can do ourselves? I’m not a programmer, I don’t know anything about programming, and that’s not my strong suit, so I like to say, “If I could learn it, anyone can learn it.” So that’s why, for me, that was a big important part for me.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give my own, I know I’m asking the questions but sometimes I have answers too. So, definitely call reference accounts, and when you are calling references, a good question is what does it take to bring a new supplier into your PLM system? That kind of a thing because, oh boy, the answer ranges and yeah, you don’t want to have to hire a separate person for whenever you switch suppliers or switch contract manufacturers.

Christine, I had another question for you, though. When you were going through the evaluation process, was it just you, or did you have a committee, or how did that work?

Christine Pompa

No, definitely cross-functional. So, we did everything paper-based; so actually both companies, we did everything paper-based. So, we had a cross-functional team get together and really map out our processes and map out our flows, and we actually asked for demos for each of the platforms that we were looking at. And it was really nice to go and see our data live in a system rather than just saying, “Oh yeah, here’s a demo, go look at XYZ product that doesn’t mirror or match what we do.” So that part of it was really nice, having the ability for the demo environment for us to look at it and get a feel for it was really helpful.

Ann McGuire

Okay, great. Dani, I’m going to go to the questions from the audience and start with you. The first question that came in was along the lines of: So now you’ve selected what you wanted, how do you get executive buy-in or how do you get an executive sponsor?

Dani Cordsen

So, one of the key things that we did to get that buy-in was to get the cross-functional support.

So, we had a lot of conversations across our team to understand where we each had pain points, and then with those live demos, being able to actually demonstrate to our executive team, here’s literally us fixing these pain points. Here’s where we’re connecting all the data, how we can maintain it ourselves, here’s what the output looks like, and we can quickly connect this out into meaningful analytics and pull it into BI tools too. So, we had a lot of opportunity that way, and that was probably the thing that did the best for us when we were getting our executives to buy in.

Ann McGuire

Okay, so they can really see they have a job they have to do, how can Arena help them make their job more easy or easier.

Dani Cordsen

And the cost of the pain points too.

Ann McGuire

I was wondering if you had to do a big ROI spreadsheet?

Christine Pompa

Yeah.

Ann McGuire

Okay. I was wondering about that. Let’s see, and then I think I have a question for Jair. This is following up on the APIs. You mentioned the integrations and the APIs, for the integrations, can you not only, we talked about the ERP integrating product information, so going from bill of material to bill of material in an ERP system, have you seen any instances where people are doing integrations that really, that tie processes together, more on the design side, I guess the engineering, process, and the PLM formal process?

Jair Aldana

Yes. So, one of the things that happens a lot of times in design is that a lot of the design tools also have a change management, like a PDM tool, and sometimes the change really starts off from there.
So then being able to have the API connectivity to be able to just start your process, let’s just say your design process from your drawing within your CAD tool, and then being able to use the API functionality to actually bring it into PLM, there’s different ways to do it.

One of them is through our Onshape connection, but that’s more of an already integrated tool, but there’s other creative ways to use it as well.

Another one is that I’ve seen a really creative case where a customer is generating a lot numbers for their product using Arena through quality processes, and they’re using the API to generate the label for their product, and they’re just able to just click and then generate the label and then have that label for production ready to then now have their product packaged and identified.

So, there’s definitely a lot of different use cases, and like Christine mentioned, I’m not technically savvy, but I know that we have the rest API document, and there’s a lot of Git pool, a lot more of these technical ways of doing it, so that’s a great benefit of API.

Ann McGuire

Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. So, did you develop the connection between the PLM and the printer, or did someone else, the label printer?

Jair Aldana

No. we had IT.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, IT. And that’s great, that’s great, that’s terrific. Let’s see if I have any more … Oh, we have one more question.

This one I’m going to start with Dani, but others probably have an opinion here, is we mentioned guardrails—when you implement Arena or a good PLM system, it sets up guardrails. What kind of guardrails did you set up and what were you trying to avoid; what risk were you mitigating?

Dani Cordsen

Yeah, the greatest thing in those guardrails is just to put visibility onto what’s happening throughout the process. So, one of the first things that we implemented is that we couldn’t roll it directly into production. So, you could put all of your ideas in, you could document, you could start practicing and working and making samples, but it wouldn’t go straight into production. That would require some approvals and it would require a whole bunch of communication before it could go forward.
We also had instances where we would change a packaging file, but it wouldn’t get communicated to our suppliers, and so the guardrail there was really having this one place to keep all of our product documentation and making sure that we were able to communicate that directly to our suppliers through the system too.
So, it was really helpful to have some of those best practices, especially for startup companies where you’re running so fast and everybody’s wearing so many hats, to have to slow down for a second to get it in and make sure that you did everything so you’re not having to redo the work later.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, that’s good. We have two more questions from the audience. Let’s see. This is tagging onto what, when I asked you Dani about getting the executive sponsor, any tips on building a strong business case or an ROI statement since substantial investment is required to implement a PLM system?

Dani Cordsen

I think one of the places that I loved to look, really, was how many different systems or spreadsheets, you say system kind of broadly, how many spreadsheets or SharePoint sites each of the primarily engineers and product managers were touching and how often they had to go into it?
And then you start doing just a quick calculate on it and you’re realizing fast that going into Trello 20 times a day to update a status is not efficient, going into seven different versions of a spreadsheet to update that data, suddenly it becomes really apparent that there’s this disconnect and that you can have savings where you can redeploy resources into something that brings more value to the company.

Christine Pompa

Coming in from a paper-based system, I found that, believe it or not, a time study of how long does it take. So, I took five random changes from three different product lines and I said, “Okay, how long does it take from the time that the doc control person starts it to the go around, get all the different signatures, so the time that it actually is released, how long did that take?” And the amount of time was astronomical. They didn’t realize, so in other words, executives just don’t realize how long it takes a change to go through until you actually do that time study.

Ann McGuire

And what that means to the business. What is an ECO doing? It’s correcting a problem, it’s introducing a new feature, it’s resolving an issue with manufacturer. You need those things; you want to keep them going. Yeah, one that I like is the backlog of ECOs. If you can reduce the ECO, and a lot of times you can put a cost to the ECO, so either a positive like you’re into reducing a new feature or you’re fixing a problem, if you can turn a hundred of them down to 10, that’s great.
Yeah, good one. How about you, Jair? Did you get into justifying?

Jair Aldana

Yeah, for us it’s always been how many different systems we are paying for subscriptions for? One of the things, once I identified that Arena could do requirements, I was like, “Oh, Arena does requirements too. This is cool.”
And then we were able to configure it and get rid of our subscription, which was major for a requirements tool that did the same thing that Arena was able to do for us.
Another thing is being able to say, “Okay, now we’re trying to evaluate a quality management system, well, Arena has quality already in it.” So therefore, just being able to evaluate, in any tool, what can the tool really do and how can it cost-save you at different standpoints of the cost that you’re doing for different subscriptions that business is paying for yearly?

Ann McGuire

Right.

Dani Cordsen

We used for ROI was looking at cost of production errors and deviations. So, we literally were air freighting stuff in because there was a production error and it was kind of on us so we would pay the air freight, but we didn’t want to rework the inventory or we had bad product going into market and we could actually put a dollar sign against that cost of production change. That was tremendous in the ROI study.

Ann McGuire

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to say, is especially with the contract manufacturing model, and you’re writing a check for scrap, basically, or you’re writing a check, you’re writing a second check to have them rework the stuff, that gets the attention of even the CEO, and it gets to be real money after a while. So that’s actually one thing—if you’re on the inside trying to justify it, I would find out what the scrap and rework rate is, and if there’s a way to tie that back to accurate complete build packages, the bill of material, and information.
Let me see if we have any more questions while we go. Oh, one more question and then we’re going to wrap. For implementing the system, does anyone have thoughts on the big bang versus phased implementation? Who would like to? I also have opinions about.

Christine Pompa

I guess it depends on your business model and what makes the best sense for you and your team. I don’t think you can do a big bang and implement everything all at once, so I think the logical way to do it, at least in my mind, is to start with your core PLM, which includes your change management and all that good stuff.

Ann McGuire

Bill of material AML.

Christine Pompa

Then maybe invite in your suppliers and put in the supplier piece. And then maybe once you have that going, then maybe loop in your quality and start to look at that. So, it’s kind of a phased approach, but that doesn’t mean it has to take years. So, it’s kind of like a big bang phased approach, I don’t know if that makes sense.

Ann McGuire

And talk about for a second, this question might’ve come from someone who’s familiar with traditional PLM. Do you want to talk about how long it usually takes to get a customer, at least that first phase, get the bill of material and the changes?

Christine Pompa

So, we have a great service that actually walks you through, and it’s a sound and proven system that usually is a 16-week or 32-week implementation launch platform, and it’s pretty much tailored to your business, but we take you through that step by step, and it’s really a very methodical process to get you launched as quickly as possible.

Ann McGuire

And definitely that varies, because we’ve had customers brag that they’ve been up in two weeks. Yeah, of course, of course. So, there’s a lot to implementing, it’s not just those. Yeah, Dani?

Dani Cordsen

I’ve experienced both of these versions of a rollout and implementation, and we found that the adoption rate with a phased approach was way higher. If we can train the trainers in the sense, we would always start with the very first part of a product goes in first, so your PMs are usually the first ones in the system, and then your engineers, and on and on down the chain. And that way, you build some subject matter experts and it also kind of shows you what you didn’t anticipate when you were planning.

In one instance, it was kind of like a revolt, like, “Oh, you didn’t even think about these things that I would need.” And it literally got shelved and the implementation stood still for almost a year, and then we had to really stand up and go through a phased approach later.

So, when we were starting fresh with a new PLM rollout, it was like, “Let’s just be considerate of that at the front end, make sure we’re engaging it all the way through, and we’re having lots of conversations as we’re implementing it.” So, it got us started quickly, and it built out some trust in the system, and it gave us the opportunity to fix mistakes that we made at the same time.

Ann McGuire

That’s terrific. To me, that’s the big benefit of the phased approach, is you get to kind of demonstrate your wins a little bit and then people start getting interested.

Hey, we have a lot to share, obviously, with this group, but we are coming up against time, so thank you so much for joining and we’ll do this again—so we hope you can join us next time. Thank you very much.