Time to Market

Streamline New Product Development and Introduction Processes

To consistently hit product launch dates, product management teams need to effectively manage design activities around a constantly evolving product definition. As component decisions are made and assemblies take shape, the task plans of individual team members need to adjust to new requirements. Of course everybody needs access to current information, but they also need a way to coordinate their activities and hand-offs to optimize team resources and work together to avoid bottlenecks that cause missed NPI deadlines.

Because critical design decisions are often made only after rounds of experimentation, prototyping, and testing, it is usually difficult to predict at the outset which branch of research and development will produce the most viable product design. For this reason, traditional top-down planning tools often fail when used to manage product projects, so managing important initiatives like new product introduction typically defaults to a manual approach based on spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and project management tools that are more suited to managing well-defined construction projects than dynamic product projects.

Arena PLM addresses these challenges through an innovative design that ties project activities 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 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 process or at any assembly level, enabling your entire team to gauge the “domino effect” that can result from one delay, a missed NPI deadline, or an unavoidable component change. By enabling all parties—from OEM employees to global supply chain partners—to track NPI project progress in real time the entire product team can make decisions with full contextual knowledge of the product and recent decisions to maximize their effectiveness and keep projects on time and on budget.

Improve Designs through Early Visibility

Making solid decisions early in design is perhaps one of the best ways to improve engineering productivity and time to market because it avoids downstream changes that become progressively more difficult and expensive as designs advance to completion, and your new product introduction process begins. By providing product team members early design visibility, Arena exposes critical product details to colleagues and partners at a time when designs can most easily be changed to address issues or accommodate useful suggestions. Arena also provides powerful component information and analysis tools to help you make informed component decisions.

Arena PLM tracks component-level cost estimates and quotes, and then automatically aggregates assembly-level costs via the bill of material (BOM). Through our partnership with Avnet Prómiere, a leading provider of technical information, Arena also provides dynamic component reference content in the context of the product structure. This makes it easier than ever to evaluate compliance and obsolescence data, review manufacturers documentation, and research costs and lead time. This improved access to information not only helps engineers cut the time it takes them to research components, but it also helps them pick the best components for their products. Arena PLM extends these benefits to authorized users from other departments, suppliers, and partners so they can evaluate components wherever they are used and at any stage in the lifecycle.

Arena also offers integrations with design tools to automatically update the component database of an outside system with product information managed in Arena. Engineers can be sure they’re starting their designs with accurate up to date information, avoiding costly downstream errors.

Accelerate Request and Change Management

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 NPI and design 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, lengthens NPI and design cycles, and directly hits the bottom line in excess and obsolete inventory from wrong or out-of-revision builds.

Arena PLM helps you capture and share product information in a central repository where it is managed and shared across all authorized users—transparent to organizational boundaries and time zones. You can easily capture input from customers, suppliers and partners as well as internal users from Engineering, Manufacturing, Procurement, and Quality Control. This enables you to quickly assemble and leverage an extensive body of experiential knowledge about your products across departments and supply chain partners.

Arena PLM captures issues, recommendations, improvement suggestions, and the complete interaction history—wherever they may originate. Your product experts can collaboratively analyze valuable feedback and ensure it never slips through the cracks, but is continually and efficiently leveraged to help design superior products.

When designs need to change, Arena PLM efficiently manages review and approval for multiple types of engineering change orders across the extended product team. Through a system of notifications and alerts, Arena PLM proactively links users to changing information and provides advanced tools for collaborative evaluation and approval. This eliminates information lag time throughout product development for everyone from suppliers to production.

Arena’s change management also includes an implementation record, with files and notes that remain editable even after the change is effective, for a complete implementation history that’s accessible to all users and suppliers that have access to the change. Implementation data can be added during the approval process, so members of the review board can consider a change’s potential impact as they assess the change. All data is locked down once the implementation’s done and the change is marked as completed.

Arena’s product master repository also serves as a central connection point to synchronize rapidly changing part and product structure information across systems. This helps speed the transition from design to production and keeps planning and execution systems current.

Synchronize Enterprise Information Systems on a Single, Current Version of the Product Master

Arena PLM’s sophisticated, flexible integration tools put you in control of when and how your data is reconciled with your enterprise systems, so it’s easy for you to maintain a “single version of the truth” across your enterprise and better manage your new product introduction (NPI) efforts. Arena PLM tracks the items and BOMs you select, and a monitoring feature indicates when they change. You can manage your own reconciliation process, or select one of our automated integration solutions for synchronization with leading CAD, EDA, and ERP systems. Arena also offers comprehensive custom integration services to assist with project management, data mapping, or testing to support your own unique requirements.