Product Analytics

Free Whitepaper Download

New Product Introduction: Challenges & Solutions from the Arena PLM Project Collaboration Study

92% of respondents faced challenges that impact NPD and NPI. Learn more about our findings and how we can help.

1.866.937.1438 |

Product Analytics Overview

Using Arena PLM, you can track product development and new product introduction projects in real-time with instant reporting on items, costs, requests, and change orders providing an accurate, up-to-date view of progress to plan. You can also track thousands of detailed tasks or just a few critical project activities required to advance your products from one development phase to the next, and quickly identify and address chokepoints at any step in the project. For companies with compliance management needs, Arena allows you to track multiple environmental, industry and safety compliance requirements, document conformity assessments with evidence files, and provide instant compliance reporting. By using a convenient BOM view and optional interface to Avnet Prómiere reference content, you can evaluate dynamic compliance and obsolescence data in the context of your assembly at any stage in the lifecycle.

Execute and Analyze Product Projects
Many companies today have turned to lean operating principles and flatter organizational structures to remain competitive. Departmental boundaries have become more informal and companies often organize cross-functional project teams to focus resources and deal with specific issues—both strategic and tactical. For example, product management teams are often organized to manage compliance to an emerging statute, address quality issues, or launch a new product to market. In practice, however, managing product development projects poses several unique challenges.

For one, in product projects, change is the rule not the exception. Critical design decisions are often made only after rounds of experimentation, prototyping, and testing, so it's usually difficult to predict at the outset which branch of research and development will produce the most viable product design. This makes it difficult for traditional-left to right-planning tools built on pre-defined assumptions to develop useful plans for managing the execution of the project.

Second, product development projects can be comprised of thousands of interdependent tasks, any one of which can delay a project or put it at risk. But, as a product design evolves, the underlying product definition (e.g., bill of material) changes as well. Imagine a building contractor planning around a constantly changing floor plan—it just doesn't work! Particularly when key components need to be tracked as their own project within a larger project, keeping task assignments aligned with a product as it changes from one design phase to the next can be daunting.

Finally, product teams are often widely distributed across geographic and organizational boundaries, and they are comprised of knowledge workers, empowered to make recommendations and review decisions. To be effective each team member needs the ability to see and update current product and project information, including detailed product specs and documentation. The traditional approach of funneling feedback through a central project manager impedes the flow of information and simply doesn't scale across numerous and more complex projects.

Arena PLM addresses these challenges through an innovative design that ties a project to the product record—continually synchronizing planning with execution. Using template-driven project definition, Arena PLM generates complex project plans automatically based on the bill of material so team members always get current task assignments and common activities across projects can be managed consistently enterprise-wide. In addition, each team member can be granted the ability to view and update product and project information to reflect current status - removing the need for manual information gathering by a project manager via phone, fax, email, etc. This includes the ability to drill into project status at any step in the project or at any assembly level, enabling your entire team to gauge the "domino effect" that can result from one delay, a missed deadline, or an unavoidable component change. By enabling all parties—from OEM employees to global supply chain partners—to track project progress in real time the entire product team can make decisions with full contextual knowledge of the product and recent decisions to keep projects on time and on budget.

 

Simplify and Streamline Compliance Management
Electronic equipment manufacturers who ship products to the European Union must now comply with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. They must be able to submit compliance reports on request, or they risk having their products banned from import.

Currently, RoHS is perhaps top of mind, but several other pending environmental regulations in China, Korea, Canada and the United States represent a broad and prominent shift in the industry. And besides environmental regulations, manufacturers often face a variety of other safety, EMC and ESD related standards and regulations (e.g., UL, CE, CCC, FCC) that illustrate managing compliance has become a critical aspect of bringing a product to market.

The basis for product related compliance assessment and declaration is a version-controlled product record maintaining full change history and component-level compliance documentation. With products facing continuous change throughout their lifecycle, tracking compliance requirements, status, exemptions, and other relevant data in manual systems will quickly get out of sync and fail to produce the required compliance report. Most other enterprise systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Data Management (PDM) simply were not designed to support these needs.

Arena PLM lets you define and apply any number of standards and regulations at the part or assembly level. You can also propagate top-level requirements to all components in the assembly. You define compliance evidence and rationale, and selectively enable suppliers to upload files so it's faster and easier to assemble all required compliance documentation. Compliance status can be instantly tracked for a single item, or across a multi-level BOM providing an aggregate view of compliance exposure for a complete product. Arena continually and automatically calculates a percentage completion analysis, and allows you to instantly view compliance reports for current and superseded revisions of a product.

Arena PLM enables the extended product team to efficiently manage compliance information in a central repository utilizing a common set of tools. This allows your team to perform analysis once, and enables authorized users to leverage this information wherever the item is used throughout the product lifecycle—including multiple assemblies. Once a part is certified as compliant, Arena PLM provides powerful item search capabilities to enable part reuse. Suppliers have real-time visibility into compliance status and are automatically notified of design-for-compliance changes so they can collaboratively evaluate supply chain impacts and then record issues, recommendations, and approvals.

 

Enable Advanced Real-Time Visibility
Having accurate information at your fingertips the instant you need it is perhaps the most basic-and yet one of the most complex-business needs to satisfy. The challenge becomes exponentially more difficult with every user or IT system added to the mix, and it's particularly challenging for large or globally distributed organizations / teams.

Component and product structure information can be highly dynamic and detailed. This is true even during the production stage where short component lifecycles, supplier part changes, part shortages, price spikes and field failures can force design changes.

Unfortunately, because there are many users of product information, the complete product record tends to be spread across multiple systems of record. As a result, the challenge in accessing accurate product details is notoriously difficult. But, as anybody with poor BOM accuracy is likely to tell you, the risk of not being able to do so significantly impacts virtually all operational areas of the business.

Arena PLM captures the full design history of a product from concept through end-of-life in a secure, central repository, providing a single version of the product record with complete context of critical design decisions and change history. Arena PLM is also designed to keep multiple systems in design and manufacturing synchronized with the latest version of information so CAD and ERP systems are always up to date.

Through a system of notifications and alerts, Arena PLM proactively links users to changing information and provides advanced tools to collaborate across organizations and time zones on product changes. And it empowers users to quickly retrieve, evaluate and distribute information to authorized users throughout their extended collaboration teams.