Product Management

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Product Management Overview

Regardless of organizational boundaries, Arena PLM provides consistent support for collaborative request and change processes through centrally managed, user-defined workflow automation that supports the way your company does business. Arena’s closed-loop framework allows requests to be escalated or grouped into change orders, preserving collaboration history and context for future use. You can define unlimited tracking codes and specify flexible evaluation and review groups for the routing of workflow notices. Out of the box, Arena provides common-sense rules to mitigate blind revisioning and ensure staged routing, so lower-level approvals must be obtained before routing to the next stage.

Accelerate Request and Change Management
With initiatives such as design-for-supply, design for compliance and recycling, and design-for-manufacturability top of mind, the ability to provide cross-functional and outsourced product teams with current, up-to-date product information is critical to success.

Whether it’s a new product moving from concept to preliminary design or a production part in need of design change, companies must constantly look for ways to optimize product change processes for time, cost, or quality. Depending on their specific business needs, market environment, and the maturity of the product, companies will focus on different design goals like design-for-supply and design-for-manufacturability. But, even when compressing cycle time is not top of mind, reducing information lag time is critical to success.

For companies that need to leverage product expertise across departments or business partners, the business challenge of keeping everyone synchronized on current information can be immense. Outdated information can produce a barrage of disconnected requests, changes and bad decisions. This decreases engineering productivity and lengthens design cycles, and directly hits the bottom line in excess and obsolete inventory from wrong or out-of-revision builds.

Arena PLM’s powerful collaborative management tools proactively notify the product team when information changes. All team members have access to a single version of the latest information with enough context to consistently produce good decisions. Using Arena, highly distributed teams can collaborate in a shared workspace that is transparent to organizational boundaries and time zones. Using only a web browser and Internet connection they have persistent, global access to dynamic information without delay.

Support Consistent Review and Approval Processes
Informal, manual procedures usually produce variable results. In custom tooled or hand tailored products, this is not necessarily bad and people often want uniqueness in their products. But for companies with complex products or operating environments, needless variation in process or design rarely produces the consistently high quality and performance that companies and customers expect from their products. Even companies with a mass-customization product strategy look to ensure that design or process changes produce value.

Lack of standardized processes makes it expensive and time consuming to support ongoing improvement initiatives (e.g., quality, manufacturability, cost, time to market) across product lines or departments. This is especially true for companies who outsource and need to align suppliers and business partners with strategic goals. Without a framework to coordinate their efforts, the risks of outsourcing can easily outweigh the potential rewards.

Arena PLM is flexible—you define the engineering request and change processes you need to support your changing business requirements. You define the structure and behavior of requests and changes, and have full control over workflow routings, users, roles and actions performed by change control board members. You can invite suppliers and partners to participate fully, or limit them to review and approval roles. Either way, Arena captures complete collaboration and product history and provides excellent visibility to all the information needed to consistently make good design and sourcing decisions.

Drive Active Partner Participation
Enabling suppliers and business partners to participate in collaborative programs can be technically challenging, but it can also present hidden costs and cultural challenges as well. Suppliers can offer valuable insight, but if the costs to manage the relationship increase, your fully landed cost will almost certainly be higher than it needs to be. Supplier users also have varying technical competencies, abilities and work processes that need to adjust to your business.

Arena PLM removes technical barriers to effective partner collaboration. Suppliers need only a web browser and Internet connection—there is no additional software or hardware for them to buy. Arena’s access controls can be configured to allow suppliers (and other 3rd party partners) full participation as a virtual member of the team or to limit them to only certain product structures or items. Arena is also easy to use so suppliers can focus on your projects, not on learning a new system. Within a very short time frame (typically less than a week) suppliers can be sharing and collaborating on your latest designs.

By streamlining and automating supplier collaboration, Arena PLM supports exactly the processes and activities you need from suppliers. Routine quote updates can be performed easier and faster—saving time compared to emailing or faxing paperwork. Suppliers become more efficient administering data updates and managing collaboration requests, so they save time and money and can offer more compelling services and better pricing. By providing the framework for effective collaboration, Arena PLM removes cost from the supply chain—instead of shifting it from one company to another. And, because it’s easy to invite and manage access authority for new users, you can quickly add new partners to capitalize on changing opportunities anywhere around the globe.