Upgrade Your PLM, Accelerate Your Innovation: Arena in Action
Transcript:
Jay Nakagawa
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everybody, and welcome to the webcast, “Upgrade Your PLM, Accelerate Your Innovation: Arena in Action,” featuring Dan Climent from Arena by PTC and several panelists.
My name is Jay Nakagawa and I serve on the PDMA Digital Content Committee that coordinates these webinars. A few quick reminders before we begin. This session is being recorded and will be available soon. Your audio is muted during the presentation, so please submit questions through the Q&A feature. You can toggle captions on or off using the controls at the bottom of your screen. Next slide, please. There we go.
I also want to extend a special welcome to PDMA members that are participating today. PDMA was founded 49 years ago as a community of professionals who power the most recognized, respected, and innovative companies in the world.
We are the global community for product development and management professionals. PDMA celebrates innovation leadership through Outstanding Corporate Innovation Award, or OCI, provides valuable resources through the knowledge hub and the journal of Product Innovation Management. We support networking through chapters and live events and recognize professional achievements through the new product development professional certification. Next slide, please. On your screen are some of the upcoming events with PDMA. Check out our first “Innovation and Focus” webcast of 2026, “Crowd Versus Expert Product Discovery and Ideation,” with Dave Sherrock, as well as our local chapter events. Follow the link in the chat to register and keep checking back since additional webcasts are frequently added.
Next slide, please. It is now my pleasure to welcome our webcast sponsor, Arena by PTC. For those who may not be familiar with Arena, they are the first cloud-native PLM/QMS platform that streamlines design, quality, and compliance processes for manufacturers to accelerate product development and collaboration.
With us today, we have Dan Climent, Vice President of Enterprise Growth. Dan, I’ll turn it over to you. Thank you.
Dan Climent
Great. Thank you. The key to winning a relay race isn’t just about running fast. It’s also about executing a smooth transition from one runner to the other. Migrating legacy systems like Agile to your next-gen PLM is no different.
It’s not just about choosing the right platform. It’s also about choosing the right partner. Hey, welcome everybody. I’m Dan Climent. I’ll be your moderator today. If you’ve used Agile in the past, you’re using Agile now, or starting the journey of selecting your next-gen PLM, you’re in the right place.
In today’s webinar, you will learn why now is the time to start considering your next-gen PLM solution, how to plan a low risk, successful migration, lessons learned on how to have a successful transition. Then we’ll see Arena in action with a live demo, and then we’ll conclude with some Q&A. Today’s panelists have a wealth of industry and PLM experience, as well as providing different perspectives.
Let’s start with Penny Dalton. She’s Associate Director of Quality Affairs, Configuration Management, and Document Control with Galvanize. Galvanize is a medical device company and an Arena customer. Penny brings over 25 years of experience leading configuration management for global medical device manufacturers and 15 years of both Agile and Arena experience at companies like Phillips Medical, AWS, and Kona Medical.
Next, we have Jeff Nichols, who’s Vice President of Professional Services with Domain Systems, which is a value-add service partner of Arena, and is also one of Agile’s first and longest implementation partners. Jeff has over 30 years of leading professional services with extensive experience leading enterprise PLM initiatives. He’s an expert in strategic consulting, process optimization, and guiding complex PLM implementations that drive long-term customer success.
And to round it up, we have Charles Vernor, who is a solution architect here at Arena. He has 15 years of experience implementing PLM solutions across MedTech, high-tech, and defense companies. He’s got extensive background with Agile, including complex configurations, data migrations, and compliance processes. Charles is a PLM/QMS specialist who has led many customers through successful upgrades from Agile environments to Arena.
Now that we’ve met our panelists, let’s get into it. Go. Jeff, we’re going to start with you. With Oracle announcing Agile’s end of life in December 2027, what does that mean for companies still using Agile and what key risks should they be prepared for?
Jeff Nichols
Yeah, great to be with you, Dan. Good question. There’s been a lot of questioning about what is going to be available or what the long-term effect of end of life really means. End of life really means the fact that the premier support that Agile user or Agile Oracle users are used to today, which they pay their annual maintenance, gives them. It gives them the ability to take updates, things of that nature, as well as bug fixes.
So what’s going away at the end of life? Basically, you need to be concerned with technical risks, right? The infrastructure, any patching, and the rate at which vulnerabilities are happening today, that technical risk is really there. So there’s no patching, no enhancements to the application, as well as just even the ability to patch and have it work with later operating systems is going away.
In addition to that, you’ve got no more innovation. Not that there has been a whole lot in the last few years, but nonetheless, they have stayed up with the technology. And then the other thing that people need to remember is that Agile has been around for 30 years.
So there’s hundreds and hundreds of customers. And with this announcement where Agile is end of life and what all that means at the end of ‘27, you need to start thinking about that now if you are worried about these technical issues that are there, the fact that one day your operating system may stop working, therefore Agile can’t be upgraded to a more modern OS, et cetera. So now is the time to start looking for preparing and actually starting to make the move.
Dan Climent
No, that’s great, Jeff. Hey, just a little follow-on question to that. I know you work with a lot of Agile clients today, Agile users. Are they getting this message from Oracle? Are they starting to start their process of what’s their next-gen PLM solution? Are you seeing an uptick in that?
Jeff Nichols
Yes. Last year we did not see a lot. This year we have seen probably half again as much. I mean, we ourselves are working with probably close to half a dozen, if not eight, different companies that are going through that planning process.
Dan Climent
Great, great. Thanks. So Penny, let’s move to you now. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest day-to-day challenges Agile users face today? How would you share that? Oh, you’re on mute.
Penny Dalton
Sorry about that. Thanks, Dan. Great to be here. Yeah. So from a day-to-day standpoint for Agile users, the first thing that comes to my mind is the GUI. It’s not visually intuitive. The overall look and feel for Agile is pretty legacy style, early 2000 style interface, very dense screens with many text fields and collapsible menus. Navigation tree is clustered and often confusing, requires training to understand item versus change versus document objects. So that’s pretty much the first thing that comes to mind.
Second is the supplier collaboration. Supplier portal and functionality is limited and difficult to navigate. Many suppliers avoid using it due to poor usability. And uploading, revising files, it also requires internal setup and permissions and that needs to be tweaking.
And then access control also. It’s pretty granular. It’s very difficult to manage. There’s usually daily support tickets for permissions. So that’s part of the supplier issues that I’ve seen.
And then the biggest for me is the ECR, ECO collaboration, the change order or change request or change order collaboration. Suppliers often can’t see ECOs or readiness due to misconfigured privileges, ECO workflows, frequently still waiting on suppliers, et cetera. Sometimes the closed loop isn’t closed after a change order has been effective. And then lastly, the built-in reporting tools in Agile. Agile uses analytics or it’s based on Oracle BI Publisher, so it’s an optional add-on. Some people use it, some people don’t. Many companies rely on spreadsheets reporting for Agile. That’s definitely what we did when I was using Agile.
Dan Climent
Got it. No, that’s great. Especially hearing a little bit about the supplier collaboration. I remember a lot of customers required a process extension; Push Discovery was a real popular one to help speed up the process of updating all those attributes to be able to share a bill of material with a contract manufacturer.
Jeff, from your perspective, is there anything you would add on to what Penny shared there?
Jeff Nichols
Yeah. Yeah, Dan. What we’re seeing is that as we deal with the Agile client base still, we’re seeing the fact that more and more companies are moving to an outsourced technologies provider option. They’re downsizing their technical footprint in-house. And because Agile is a client server application, that expertise, that knowledge, that understanding of how Agile is architected is no longer in the company.
And so it becomes a very difficult thing. Even though Agile through the years has been very stable and all that kind of stuff, kind of a low-maintenance solution. When there are problems, nobody is around, and nobody is knowledgeable in-house that can provide the assistance that the companies need.
So again, client server is an older technology. Everything’s going to the Cloud with SaaS. I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong, that’s up to a company to decide. And then the fact that everybody is being outsourced and they’re scaling down on their IT infrastructure and footprint for support, those are the things we see.
Dan Climent
So just having those skillsets around, that’s evolving more cloud-based solutions where they don’t need to actually maintain those in in-house.
Jeff Nichols
Correct.
Dan Climent
And that becomes a challenge now. That’s good to know. Penny, let’s go back to you. As companies start the journey of picking their next solution and planning for migration, what are some of the biggest concerns they have moving off of Agile or any legacy PLM solution?
Penny Dalton
Yeah. So as Jeff pointed out earlier, Agile has been around for a very long time. So a lot of Agile customers have been with Agile and many grew up with Agile from coming in from college, starting in the company, a lot of legacy users, Agile users.
So the biggest thing that comes to my mind right away is cultural resistance or the engineer’s quality and purchasing and suppliers may even resist that workflow.
And so that’s one of the biggest concerns that a company has. The mentality of, “We’ve always done it this way, the way we’ve always done it with Agile,” versus, “We’re going to migrate to a brand new PLM system.”
And most PLM systems nowadays look very differently than Agile because of Agile’s legacy look and feel. The next thing is integration as well. A lot of customers are going to be very concerned about integration, integrating with their CRM, with their ERP, with their CAD, folks or customers that already have Agile and NetSuite integrated or SAP or Oracle EBS.
What’s that going to look like with a new PLM system? The other thing is user adoption and training challenges. Will the engineers resist leaving a system that they’ve used for more than 10+ years? Will executive teams get the dashboard and visibility that they expect? How many training sessions are going to be required? So those are a lot of the biggest challenges that a company may be looking at having to migrate from a legacy PLM that they’ve used for many, many years.
Dan Climent
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Jeff, is there anything you would add to that from your perspective?
Jeff Nichols
Yeah, so far as we have dealt with a few dozen customers that have already started and actually have made that journey, one of the number one things that they did not want to do was lose the history.
You cannot forget about history, and people look back at history for lessons learned, for understanding the information, et cetera. And so number one, having that history or an audit trail of the approvers for all your change orders, who do we go back to when we have that conversation? As well as the historical revisions, how did Rev A differ from Rev C? Type of a thing on a bill of material. Those things as well as Agile has a set of features and functionality capabilities.
To Penny’s point, the adoption and change, they’re used to those activities, those capabilities. They want to make sure that they can utilize those same like features and functionalities despite the fact that it might behave a little differently. So history and feature and functionality sets.
Dan Climent
Yeah, that’s great. So what I’m gathering is change is a challenge for anybody, especially if you’ve been on a legacy solution from day one. As Penny mentioned, people came out of college working on Agile for decades now and then getting the right data over history and not losing any capability.
I would’ve sum up what I just heard there. Charles, from your perspective, I’d like to hear from you, a lot of companies have implemented process extensions inside of Agile or with any PLM solution that might be some customizations they’ve done. How would you say those map to Arena?
Charles Vernor
Yeah, thanks, Dan. That’s a really good question, and that’s a question I get a number of times from customers during the implementation. First point on that I’d like to make from a high-level perspective, companies should avoid with directly mapping the process extensions, the functionality, and how the actions happen within their PLM system.
They should really be focusing on going back to basics on the overall business processes that those process extensions support and just looking at the outcomes that they’re needing to achieve. So look at that first from a high level and then dive into details about what’s going to be achievable within the Arena UI directly or with using a customization or integration in Arena.
Many of what the popular process extensions out there we’ve seen, there are a number of them that have something equivalent or even better functionality within Arena directly. So you mentioned earlier, Dan, about Push Discovery for external supplier access within Agile.
So within Arena, an equivalent for that, we do have supplier access licenses. So you can give access out to your supplier users, they can log into your Arena workspace, and you’d be able to control sharing at the top level or any level in the bill of material.
And then there’s native sharing directly within the UI to be able to share child items on a BOM all the way from the top level to the bottom. And then those supplier access users will be able to instantly see all of that product data and file attachments and so on that they can export in order to do their work.
Another example we see oftentimes is a customer wants to automatically create a ECO from an ECR, a change order from change request, or even creating a CAPA from a nonconformance. Those are things that we have within Arena within our low-code automations. So that eliminates the need for having a Java developer doing customizations, process extensions to do those sort of things. So just a lot of those things are not needed going forward with Arena. There are a number of process extensions that go even deeper into one-off custom business rules, calculations.
Something that we don’t necessarily support directly within the UI, but we do, in those cases, have a number of our REST API endpoints for create, read, update, and delete actions. We have integration adapters for easily being able to import and export data out of Arena. And then we have our integration platform that customers can use for more complex automations and integrations to other systems as well.
Dan Climent
No, that’s great. So it sounds like we have a path and it starts with understanding what’s the business outcome you’re trying to achieve. And it may not always be exactly the same way it was done with Agile or with the process extension, but there’s some better modern ways to do and achieve the same things as well.
And some of the things are out of the box even with Arena. So that’s great to hear that. Charles, let’s stay with you. As companies are starting to plan this process, what are some best practices approached to planning for a migration from a legacy PLM to Arena?
Charles Vernor
Yeah, so companies can start today on preparing for this in a number of ways. So you can start having organizational discussions with your different teams with engineering, quality, and manufacturing activities.
Understand that you are going to be moving to a different tool than what you’re using today. So there are going to be some differences, that is expected, and review the upstream applications like your ECAD, MCAD tools, and downstream systems like your ERP and MES systems, and look at those current pain points and inefficiencies that exist today.
The upgrade for your PLM is a great opportunity to increase collaboration across teams and improve the quality. And as Penny said, challenge those areas where it’s always been done this way and making sure that you have executive sponsorship around this transition, so that way you do have alignment towards a better future state with as little pain as possible getting there.
And then process-wise, data-wise, look at your SOPs, identify the outcomes that you look to achieve, and then take inventory of your current data that you have. And you can also, from a process perspective, you can also reach out to folks like Domain to help you assess your current process, and they can help you, advise you from a third party on current best practices, and they’re not married to your way of doing things. So those are some ideas to plan for the future.
Dan Climent
That’s great. Great guidance. Jeff, that’s a great segue to you. Anything you would add on?
Jeff Nichols
I think that involving a third party, granted, I know that I’m going to be that third party possibly, but involving that third-party perspective is always good because we bring insight. The third party can bring insight into new ways of accomplishing the objective that the company has, as well as we’re not quote/unquote, “a salaried employee of the company,” so we can’t be fired from you if you speak against a particular area or process or challenge it. And so I think a third-party insight is always good.
Dan Climent
No, that’s great. That’s great. Penny, let’s come back to you. As companies are starting to go down this journey, what guidance would you give organizations that are considering choosing a new PLM solution and partner to replace Agile or any legacy system?
Penny Dalton
Yeah, so the first thing is the business requirements. You need to find a solution that can meet your current and future growth and your future business requirements. The next thing is robust integration capabilities.
So you need to really find the next solution to be able to integrate with your current systems. Industry experience as well is very important. You need to find a solution that understands Agile, that has worked with many customers that had Agile in the past.
And yes, bringing in a third party like Domain is really crucial as well because then Domain, in my experience, a company like Domain, they champion for your company. They’re the ones who help you understand your processes. They understand the new solution that you’re going to be using, and they have good track record with Agile. For many years, I’ve known about Domain when I was working and using Agile in the past. Yeah, definitely that experience is really important.
And then collaboration with suppliers and partners, it’s also critical that your new solution would be easy for your suppliers and partners to be able to use. Some solutions out there that I know, Arena, for example, you have different types of licensing for your suppliers.
You can even have partnerships with your suppliers, which helps out a lot in regards to giving them visibility to more of the product that you want them, or documentation that you want them, to see. Will your suppliers be able to easily access your BOMs and your drawings? How integrated can they be, or as limited as can they be, with your change process? Does the portal give suppliers clear tasks, et cetera? So yeah, that’s some of the main things that I would highly recommend you think about.
Dan Climent
No, that’s great. That’s great, Penny. And just to stay with you, I mean, you’ve had hands-on experience of both Agile for many, many years and Arena. Can you do a little bit of comparison? Is it similar? Is it different? What’s your experience?
Penny Dalton
Yes, yes. So I’m very, very pleased. I was very, very pleased when I was working with some customers, our contract manufacturers actually, who had very heavy Agile background. And being able to share and train them on Arena was so much easier than I thought because Arena does have a lot of Agile-type routes. For example, the tabs for each workspace, it was really, really neat to be able to easily show them.
And the neat thing about the comparison is I was able to share with them, when you look at Arena, you don’t see the navigation that you’re used to with Agile on the side, but there is a navigation and you can click this and then it comes out.
With Arena, you can see all the vendors in one interface for the sourcing tab, for example. So it’s really important to make sure that the solution that you do pick knows Agile as well.
And yes, Domain would help, but it would also help very well if the next product that you pick, such as Arena, totally understands Agile, and it’s very collaborative with that. Yeah.
Dan Climent
No, excellent. Thanks for your insight on that. Jeff, let me go to you. Beyond technical implementations, what kind of value-add services does Domain systems offer to help customers succeed?
Jeff Nichols
Well, we’ve talked about several of them already, such as bringing that third party for a project management or just for the strategic consulting. We do data extractions. We take the data out of Agile or whatever system you’ve got and bring it into the new PLM solution, business process workshops.
We’ve got talent and skillsets in not only the PLM space, but also the QMS space, the compliance space, the project management space for projects, and things of that nature. So we can provide those various pieces that help round out and provide a customer solution.
Dan Climent
That’s great. Sounds like a lot of complementary services you offer to work with Arena and to help with a lot of that change that organizations might have to deal with. No, that’s excellent. Hey, so that concludes our panel discussion right now.
Let’s see Arena in action. So Joe Erickson, one of our principal solution consultants, he’s going to take us through a demo and see a little bit of some of what we’ve talked about.
Joe Erickson
Yeah. Hey, thank you, Dan. So everyone on the call, welcome, and thank you for giving me a few minutes. So the intent here is just to show you a selection of capabilities, really, that we think are differentiators as you take your products through their lifecycle management.
And I really appreciate Penny’s comments. So the first one that we’re really going to look at is the concept of what we call Arena homepages. And instead of a very rigid environment where the casual user comes in and it’s very difficult to find information, Arena lets you configure one to many homepages and really have that information focused on what’s important to that person’s role.
And so as I logged into the system, I’ve got a dashboard that’s showing me some product information, some saved searches. I’m getting an email that says, stop my video. Am I not shared? Okay. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So yeah, on my homepage, I have saved searches. So as Penny talked about in the rigid environment, it’s a tree. There’s a lot of things on it. With the save searches, I’m able to create a search, real important, save that search, and then even more important, share that search.
So in this case, I’m looking at some product data, I’m looking at my documents, but I’m also able to see notifications, bookmarks. And with these homepages, you pick from a selection of prebuilt objects as well as analytics.
I do just want to flip to another homepage or another page just so you can see the contrast. So let’s say my focus was on quality. So when I log into the system, I may want to see my nonconformances, I might want to see my corrective actions, and I would be able to see these all on my particular homepage.
What’s really nice, too, is if you lay out this homepage, you can end up sharing it with single users to user groups. And then I want you to think very importantly, Penny talked about that sort of fixed portal. You got one way to come in and that’s it. You can actually create a homepage that is geared towards your suppliers. Put on their pages what you think is important for them so you can share that.
So in this case, Graham is somebody new in the company. I don’t want them struggling. When they get into the system, I want them focused 100% on what they need to be working on. So the other thing you’ll notice, too, is the analytics. So the analytics are now embedded in Arena. We talked about, especially I was an Agile guy for 12 years, deploying analytics was a very difficult task, a very expensive task.
We’ve made it easy. We’ve put the analytics right into the application and these can be put onto your homepages. You can create as many new ones as you need to. And we’re going to actually, just as we keep moving through here, we’re going to focus on this one called the IC, and this is part of our integrated supply chain. And this one’s actually happening automatically. We’ve got product in the system and our connector to, or our supply chain intelligence is actually monitoring each component for risk. And we can actually end up identifying and seeing that in my notifications that I might have something out of spec.
So what I’m going to do next is really jump down into the product record itself. You heard Penny talk about that layout that is very familiar. So when you come in there, the cover page, we call it the spec page, but this is my product. It’s going through a number of lifecycle changes.
And then I go to, of course, the bill of material. And I have a number of views that I can look at. I can look at it from that sourcing view. In a minute here, we’re going to look at it from a risk standpoint. But what’s really nice is rather than little dots that tell me something’s there, I actually can hover over a section, in this case see, there’s a number of different files that are connected to that assembly, there’s an active ECO that’s going on.
There may be one or more quality events that are going on, and these are real links into the system that I can find more information on. So very similar look and feel with the tabs. I think one of the things we do very well is the relationship tab. It tends to get cluttered with a lot of information. We have very purpose-built sections where if it’s connecting to quality, it’s connecting to a ticket.
Compliance, you’ll have tabs to be able to see that information. Next thing I want to do is just look at what we call supply chain intelligence. We saw it on the chart. We saw that there were some things that were getting to be problematic.
This is Arena’s supply chain intelligence. We’re connected to Accurus. And in this case, the system is identifying to me that there’s a component that is of high risk. It went out there and monitor it on its own. One of the things you can do right here is go ahead and hit the find button, and this will actually go out there and look for substitutes for you.
So a very nice feature comes along. So if you’re using Silicon Experts, there’s the potential for that to be able to go away. The next thing I want to do here is just highlight something that we think is really valuable in the change control environment, and that is something we call implementation tasks.
This is quite different than the Agile environment where things tend to get very tight up in workflows, they’re very rigid. What we’ve done is created implementation tasks. And so now you can actually have one to many assignments, two people with due dates, so that rather than, again, it being stuck in workflows, you can add to the list, you can change the dates, you can change the assignments, and these are all gating whether or not the project can be completed.
One of the things that I worked on, or been asked to do, is review a procedure. So in this case, what I want to do is another feature that we’ve added in here using AI is the ability to review and compare documents. So as I come in here, I can simply compare the two here. So Dan, I’m going to actually wrap up with this once we have the comparison. That was the wine and cheese taster, and I’ll hand it back to you, but just wanted to look at a couple of things that we think are really important in the application.
So here we can see the comparison of this protocol from its version one to its version two. So Dan, you’re all set. That was the quick journey, and we hope everyone will come back for a longer demo, but Dan, if you want to take it back.
Dan Climent
That’s great. Thanks for the demo, Joe. Some exciting things there for sure. Let me share here. And so that concludes that piece. Now we’re going to move into some Q&A here. And as we start to bring in some questions, I’ll have this up here. This is just a number of customers that have made the transition from Agile to Arena. All right.
Let me start with the first question here, “How long would you expect a typical migration to take?” Charles, I’m going to ask you to respond to that one.
Charles Vernor
Yeah, that’s a good question. Based on what we’ve had experienced the task with our customers, the smaller PLM flips from one system to Arena or maybe a new PLM implementation for a customer, those typically get done about 12 weeks on average, give or take, including all of the initial Arena data configuration of the workspaces, doing the test data extraction, testing, user acceptance tests, doing the final end-user training and prep and execution of go-live.
So 12 weeks on average. The larger customers that we work with have more teams or have more complex requirements and validation could be longer implementations like six to nine months because those have a lot more complex phases with building and testing the configuration through multiple cycles, getting to a design freeze, doing all of their documentation updates from the current process to the new process, doing user acceptance testing and informal validation.
Many life science customers know that painfully well. Data migration activities, doing the data loads and verification of the data, and then doing those end-user trainings and go-live cutovers without having major disruption to the organization.
So those are larger and more complex that need to be planned for.
Dan Climent
That’s great. So a lot of it depends on what their specific needs there are and the level of complexity, but it can go pretty quickly or not too long. That’s great. Thanks, Charles. I have another question here, and I think Jeff teed this one up earlier with one of his responses, but, “Can revision history be extracted from Agile and migrated to Arena?”
And Jeff, I’ll have you start responding to that one.
Jeff Nichols
Yeah, just in quick, the simple answer is yes, there are different ways that that can be done as well as the way in which Arena is architected. You can have your history in a separate workspace that basically segregates it from migrated history versus ongoing history from the point in time which you take your latest stuff and move forward.
So yes, the answer is yes. The history from a revision history, change approval history, or even that history tab in Agile can be migrated.
Dan Climent
That’s great. Charles, anything you would add to that from the Arena side?
Charles Vernor
Jeff had answered most of those different options. Yeah, we can do the latest revision only, latest and greatest revision. We can do the separate historical workspace that only certain admins can get access to for the historical repository.
If they ever need to go back and look at that, just need to look at what type of historical data and what the long-term benefits are for having that in order to keep it in a separate workspace. And we can also handle the full migration history, the latest revision plus all the historical revisions, depending on coming from a legacy system, electronic system that has all of that history well maintained.
Instead of doing it by manually tracking, coming from another system is going to be better. And then customers, during discussions with Arena can determine which method is best and what the costs are for the different complexities of the historical data.
Dan Climent
That’s great. So it sounds like there’s a lot of different options depending on what the needs are, and so history can be brought over, can be extracted and brought over to Arena, so that’s great to know that. Let me take a look here.
So this is a little question about Arena. So Penny, this is a question for you, but what’s your experience been like working with Arena’s customer success organization as a customer?
Penny Dalton
It’s awesome. It’s awesome. For Agile customers, especially who are worried about not having or not having that in-house IT support, Arena has been pretty good about making sure that we have support.
I call them my four pillars of Arena success. We’re given, of course, an account executive that helps us through all of the accounting and the financials. And then when you integrate, you are given a solutions architect.
I’ve implemented Arena several times with different companies, and I have to tell you, my gosh, the solutions architect are awesome. And I’ve worked with several of them from one company to the next. So I know them by name, I have them on my phone. It’s great. When you have one, you pretty much have that solution architect for your company until that person leaves. And like I said, solutions architect are around. They’ve implemented with me.
And then of course, the success coach. These are my go-to people. Anytime of the day within 24 hours, I get a response. If they can’t answer the questions, then they send me over to technical support. Again, I know these folks by names, by name, and it’s been a great, great team to work with, all four pillars of Arena. And then of course, Arena has a help section where you can go in and you do the videos and they have videos.
It also does have AI capability now. You can ask questions, and it gives you AI answers. And then of course, if you’re more the old school, there’s indexing and stuff. Oh, and training’s actually included with the subscription.
So all of this that I’ve explained, it’s included in your subscription. So when you take on Arena, you will have your four pillars of success, is what I call them.
Dan Climent
No, that’s great, Penny. So some great questions, and there’s some others, and we want to make sure we follow up with everyone, but also respect everybody’s time today. So that’s going to conclude our Q&A, and we will follow up with other questions that have come through.
So I just today wanted to provide some insights that we covered why it’s time to start considering your next-gen PLM solution and partner. We discussed how Agile has stood the test of time.
It definitely has stood the test of time, but there are new business challenges that require modern solutions. And as a panelist shared, change is not easy, but selecting a partner that understands your legacy system and has a strong track record of successful migrations is key to a smooth transition.
And finally, we saw how Arena offers an Agile-like framework, but with modern capabilities like analytics, no-code automation, supply chain intelligence, AI, and much more. So before we end the webinar here, I would like to just offer, if you want more information, scan the QR code that’s on the screen or visit arenasolutions.com.
We’d love to have the opportunity to help you as you start this journey. And then I’d also like to say, “Hey, thank you,” to our panelists. Joe, that was a great demo, great insights from the panelists. And of course, thank you to everyone else who has joined today’s webinar.
Jay Nakagawa
Okay. It looks like we’re out of time. I want to thank Dan and the panelists, Penny, Jeff, and Charles, for taking the time to share your knowledge, and Joe for the demo. If you have any questions that were not answered today, please reach out directly to Dan or let us know and we’ll put you in touch with them.
Please take a moment to provide feedback on today’s webcast by completing the survey. You can access the survey via the link in the chat, and you will also receive a follow-up email in the coming days with links to the survey, recording, and handouts.
Once again, on behalf of Kelly, PDMA, our speakers, and the rest of the Digital Content Committee, thank you for joining us today and have a great day.