Arena Unveils PLM Collaboration and New Data Extraction Tool

This tool provides collaboration from within the product record and captures complete process data for analysis

Arena Solutions

Foster City, Calif.Oct. 3, 2014Arena Solutions, a provider of cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) applications, announced its Fall 2014 release, which includes two new modules—Arena Scribe and Arena DataExtract—and enhancements to Arena Quality. The newly available products are focused specifically on speeding time to market. They enable real-time communication and the aggregation of a complete history of tribal knowledge throughout the supply chain tied to the product record. They also provide a fast, efficient tool for extracting process data from Arena PLM to analytic tools.

In today’s fast-paced, hyper-competitive marketplace, product companies and their ever-growing network of suppliers depend on effortless, transparent communication to resolve issues and ensure they are completely in sync with one another. Confusion creates unacceptable delays, scrap and rework, which can result in surrendering “first mover” advantage for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Arena Scribe gives customers an easy-to-use collaboration platform that provides a real-time commenting page available on any Arena Item, Change, Request, Supplier, Supplier Item, File, Project or Quality process. Arena Scribe enables comment and collaboration in the context of each individual process or record in Arena PLM. The design and manufacturing team can collaborate with any number of suppliers to solve problems quickly and directly within the product record, in which all conversations are captured, eliminating the need to search through an endless string of disparate email threads to unearth information from a previous exchange.

Users can choose to follow comment streams that interest them, and receive dashboard and email alerts to stay up to date on incoming information. Suppliers with access to the underlying object can participate and add comments, but may view only the comments made public by employees. Every individual in the enterprise and their design/supply chain can use Arena Scribe to improve the product, with a single, interactive forum within the product record to offer innovative ideas and solutions. Users can make conversations public or private, and not unlike social media, provide the ability to follow or unfollow, all the while maintaining entire control of the process.

Arena DataExtract enables customers to extract all process data to a standard, flat file format, which can be analyzed using a variety of analytic tools, from relatively simple spreadsheet applications to sophisticated business intelligence and analytics platforms. With this data, customers can identify trends, solve problems and find efficiencies that previously remained hidden. The possibilities include:

  • Product health.
  • Product development.
  • Root cause analyses.
  • Trends in cycle time.
  • Project task status.
  • Trends in engineering change orders.

Finally, the Arena Fall 2014 release includes significant enhancements to Arena Quality, a module released earlier this year that brings visibility, cross-functional team collaboration and long-term tracking of quality resolutions to the enterprise’s core. Arena Quality is now even easier to use. Quality processes can be chained together as issues are discovered, which lead to escalation to give all stakeholders the complete picture. New capabilities include the automated setting of status based on step completion, the ability to connect items to quality processes straight from the item header, and process status, which is kept up to date automatically as steps are completed.

With these additional capabilities, Arena’s customers can continue to improve their time to market by proactively including quality processes in the development cycle, build a higher quality product through the creation of a culture of continuous improvement and reduce costs while boosting margins.

“In today’s highly interconnected world, product and manufacturing companies heavily depend on their supply chain, which makes easy, transparent communication with suppliers an absolute must-have to compete in a fast-paced, hyper-competitive marketplace,” said Steve Chalgren, vice president of product management and strategy at Arena. “The cloud provides the potential for this kind of global collaboration.”

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