Arena Solutions: A Program Review

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CIMdata, Inc. 3909 Research Park Drive Ann Arbor, MI 48108 +1 734.668.9922 www.CIMdata.com

Arena Solutions: A Program Review

Originator of Multi-Tenant Cloud PLM Makes

Solution Scalable for Largest Enterprises

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Arena Solutions Program Review

Manufacturing companies face unrelenting global competition with fast changing business conditions, growing regulatory constraints, and a more demanding market. They require flexible, collaborative, scalable product development environments in which all elements work together to enable them to easily and cost effectively add, remove, or change the components of that environment for themselves and the partners of their extended supply chains. Arena Solutions provides a highly scalable, cloud delivered suite of PLM and supply chain solutions that address these needs for organizations ranging from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to large multi-national enterprises.

Executive Summary

Manufacturing companies in every industry need cost-effective scalable product development solutions that enable them to quickly develop, manufacture, and service their products. Succeeding in the highly competitive global marketplace requires them to be able to quickly tailor their products to meet local and global requirements and adapt to changing market conditions and emerging competition. Organizations require product development environments that are flexible and scalable and that can be easily delivered to work securely across diverse, distributed design and manufacturing environments.

Arena Solutions, originator of multi-tenant, cloud-delivered Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), provides user-ready solutions developed to address key business processes as well as satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements. Arena PLM’s scalable, secure cloud solutions have evolved to meet the demands of any size company from SMBs to large multi-national global enterprises. Their solutions are built on a robust multi-tenant infrastructure architected to maximize performance, reduce cost, and enable maximum flexibility so companies can rapidly adapt to changes in their business needs.

CIMdata believes that Arena provides a cost effective PLM solution suite that can meet the needs of many manufacturers. Even the largest companies that are looking to implement or expand their PLM and product development environment should include Arena Solutions in their evaluations.

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Introduction

Manufacturing companies in every industry are facing multiple challenges across all areas of their business. They must be able to quickly address these challenges in a nimble, flexible manner to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty and improve their competitive position. They need product development solutions that enable them to quickly develop, manufacture, and service their products more efficiently, flexibly, and at lower cost. They need all these components to be integrated and to communicate seamlessly while simultaneously being able to adapt rapidly to changes in business relationships and supply chain partners.

Foremost is competing in a global economy, as manufacturing companies face fierce competition from all regions of the world. Innovative companies must be able to develop products effectively with a complex web of partner networks to meet demand as well as compliance initiatives and other regulatory requirements. They must be able to quickly tailor their products to meet local and global requirements and adapt to changing market conditions and emerging competition.

Optimizing product development is crucial to capturing maximum value, no matter what role a company plays in the supply chain. Product companies need to be able to make key time-quality-cost tradeoffs in an increasingly competitive global market. To do this, they must work with primary partners and their sub-tier suppliers. Efficient, effective collaboration between OEMs and their supply chain is pivotal to successfully bring products to market on time and on budget, especially in today’s global, outsourced manufacturing marketplace. Success requires being able to share product related information and data as well as collaborate effectively throughout the development lifecycle. This can even require the flexibility to efficiently outsource sub-system design after ideation. Manufacturing companies require solutions that work securely across distributed design and manufacturing environments. Such solutions can provide the flexibility to adapt both design and manufacturing to constantly changing business and market requirements. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has evolved greatly over the last 20+ years from basic PDM to enterprise business solutions that manage globally distributed product development processes from concept through end of life. PLM solutions continue to evolve to address the business issues described above.

Arena has designed its solutions to help enable enterprises to meet these challenges—providing the business functionality required coupled with cloud-based delivery for cost effective deployment flexibility and scaleability.

Research for this paper was partially supported by Arena Solutions.

Enterprises in all industries need cost effective, scalable PLM environments that will enable them to create and maintain a competitive market position

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Arena’s PLM History and Strategy

Founded in 2000, Arena Solutions originated multi-tenant cloud PLM and continues to be a leader of cloud-based delivery of PLM. The company initially focused on helping SMBs manage their Bills of Materials (BOMs) and their basic product development processes (primarily in engineering). Since its inception, Arena has invested in expanding the scope of its solutions to address both the needs of customers and their respective supply chains alike, and now provides comprehensive PLM solutions for enterpises of all sizes.

Key to its success is that Arena understands most OEMs are dependent upon a supply chain which in some instances, partially or entirely, designs their solutions. To be most effective, this symphony of collaboration (ideation to design to development to manufacturing) must be easy, seamless, and work securely across distributed enterprises while having the flexibility to incorporate selected suppliers as business needs dictate.

Over the years, Arena has taken a forward thinking, pragmatic approach to addressing the business challenges of manufacturing companies. They understand the challenges of creating, managing, and leveraging dynamic supply chains and have incorporated the appropriate architecture and technologies to address these issues.

Arena provides user-ready solutions developed to address key business processes as well as satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements, not software tool-kits that are common in the marketplace. They are designed to provide intuitive, integrated, easy to deploy and use solutions for both internal and external (suppliers, partners, and customers) users.

Arena has built a robust integration framework to link to other business systems such as ERP, MCAD, ECAD, and others. Their solutions consistently tie to and pass product record data to prevent errors stemming from manual data entry, while ensuring information is accurately shared in real-time with related enterprise systems. They now provide a comprehensive solution suite that extends well beyond managing the core product record to address the product development lifecycle. Customers that need to better manage deliverables during the new product developent process can leverage Arena Projects. And for those that need to address customer complaints, internal audits and corrective action preventive action (CAPA), Arena Quality provides the ability to manage a closed-loop CAPA process linking issues and resolution directly to the product record.

Arena has historically focused on high tech, life sciences, consumer electronics, clean tech, consumer products, and related industries. For medical device customers in particular (a portion of the life sciences vertical), Arena’s solutions include functionality to meet industry-specific requirements (e.g., enabling compliance to 21 CFR Part 11 and 820, managing Design Master Records and

Arena Solutions

originated multi-tenant cloud PLM and continues to be a leader of cloud-based delivery of PLM

Arena provides user-ready solutions developed to address key business processes as well as satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements

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Design History Files, and providing validation services). For high tech customers, Arena provides an ability to manage environmental compliance initiatives like RoHS, REACH, and conflict minerals.

With the recent IoT explosion of complex electronics embedded into devices connecting to the Internet, the array of verticals using Arena’s solutions has grown extensively as they continue to expand into new markets and are fast approaching 1,000 customers in over 79 countries.

Arena Solution’s scalable, secure cloud solutions have evolved to meet the demands of any size company from SMBs to large multi-national global enterprises. Their solutions are built on a robust multi-tenant infrastructure architected to maximize performance, reduce cost, and automate recovery while enabling Arena to deliver frequent enhancements that can drive increased value for customers. Arena’s strategy of having a multi-tenant architecture enables them to quickly and easily incorporate new features and functionality that customers can use as they need them.

Enterprise Success with Arena PLM

Arena was developed to be 100% cloud, 100% multi-tenant over fifteen years ago. Data protection takes place in multiple forms. Arena’s data centers are secured with biometric controls, and segregated cages from other occupants. Arena has invested extensively in secure firewalls, network communication encryption, security protocols, and facilities for tracking usage of IP addresses to permitted corporate IP addresses. Arena routinely leverages third party penetration services to make sure they are continuing to stay on top of security threats.

Physical redundancies exist in the form of routers, storage devices, controllers, power sources, load balancing, and data centers. Their infrastructure, security, and network teams work hand in hand with their product development teams to ensure that security, redundancy, quality, and reliability are maintained with each new release. Organizations that use cloud-delivered applications and product development environments need to have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with their providers designed to maintain the required availability of services and functionality. Arena contracts to a SLA of 99.5% and has consistently excceded this guarantee.

Arena’s PLM Solutions

From its early capabilities designed to support BOM management, Arena’s solution suite has grown to address many of the issues that manufacturing companies and their supply chains face. Their enterprise business solutions provide the core data management for the product related information needed to develop and build a product. They also include project management, quality management, and product demand forecasting.

Arena was developed to be 100% cloud, 100% multi-tenant

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The additional products highlight the breadth of Arena’s solution suite, delivering complementary solutions that connect the many teams working to help companies bring new products to market or just improve existing products. This constantly expanding group of solutions helps enable companies to address their specific product design and development requirements.

Arena has developed a broad suite of scalable product development lifecycle management solutions as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1—Arena Solutions’ Solution Suite

It is important to note while each of these solutions and components provides specific capabilities, they work together in a seamless, integrated manner. For example, the quality module is embedded in BOMControl and tied directly to the product record. Companies can select which capabilities they wish to deploy at a given point in time, enabling them to grow from a small, narrowly focused deployment to a comprehensive, enterprise-wide implementation. Arena’s cloud-delivered solution suite is architected to be highly flexible so that an enterprise can turn on or retire solution modules simply and rapidly at low cost. This eliminates the need to use additional administrative or consultative personnel when changing their active product development environment.

Arena Solutions provides a comprehensive suite of PLM functionality that address the needs of manufacturing companies of all industries and sizes

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Copyright © 2015 by CIMdata, Inc. 6 Arena BOMControl incorporates a comprehensive suite of solutions that enables companies to create, manage, and share BOM information within their distributed enterprise and across their supply chain. BOMControl bridges the gap between design, engineering and manufacturing by providing a controlled, centralized way to manage changes to product record data. In so doing, the OEM cross-functionally possesses a single, unified version of the truth that can be seamlessly shared with authorized supplier personnel. This ensures that everyone is working on up-to-date information that is clear, concise, and valid.

BOM management supports complex, multi-level BOMs and comparisons between different products and SKUs or different BOM revisions for the same product. A collaborative Change Management capability ensures that changes are only made by authorized individuals (who can also be a supply chain partner), and that they are effectively tracked to ensure auditability and compliance. Document Management enables any file type to be correctly associated with product items and structures providing the single, controlled source of truth for all product related data.

Item Management and AML/AVL Management provide control and compliance for raw materials and other components as OEMs and their suppliers seek to purchase the right products at the right price. Supply Chain Collaboration supports effective interaction between an OEM and their many design and manufacturing partners in a secure, highly scalable environment.

Arena Quality, embedded in Arena BOMControl, incorporates enteprise quality

processes tied directly to the product record. It maintains a full audit trail of actions taken during the quality review process to enable effective quality management across the entire product portfolio. Companies can either use out-of-the-box quality templates or they can customize quality processes to meet their individual needs. Personnel working on any product development project can have access to consistent, common quality information and can collaborate on quality issues. This includes authorized suppliers who can also launch and run a quality process.

Arena Projects provides scheduling and task assignment capabilities. The

schedule is linked to the product record at all schedule levels, enabling global collaboration around items, changes, quality issues, files, and, via links, to other enterprise business systems or objects. Full reporting of all project data across the Arena workspace allows users to do detailed cross-project analyses and assessments of company efficiency.

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Arena Projects allows Arena PLM users to flexibly track project progress through customizable phases and assignable milestones and tasks, so that projects get done correctly and on time. Reference links to items, changes, files, requests, projects, and any other application give users the ability to confirm task completion by viewing direct updates to the product record in the schedule context. It supports global collaboration through schedule notes and detailed status tracking to keep the entire team aligned.

Arena Demand leverages the multi-level BOM to provide customers the ability

to aggregate component usage across all products. Arena Demand then merges this information with forecasted demand and outputs a complete list of parts indicating how many should be purchased based on the forecast. By enabling enterprises to analyze procurement related data, Arena Demand is designed to provide increased procurement visibility and negotiating power, in particular for companies that do not have, or are not using, a Manufacturing Resource Planning application.

Arena Analytics, scheduled for release in fall 2015, is a cloud-based enterprise

business intelligence tool designed to visually help customers identify the operational health of product processes at a glance. Integrated with Arena’s PLM product suite, it will help provide insights needed to make better product decisions, improve time to market predictability, and review overall supply chain status with minimal effort. Reports and metrics are created once, with results automatically refreshed providing visibility to product performance indicators easily and quickly while eliminating the manual collation and feeding of data into reports. Reports are displayed directly in the Arena PLM dashboard. Stakeholders can create multiple dashboards with customized KPIs to measure product process performance focused on key areas such as product cycle times, quality trends, project performance, and supply chain impact. Bottlenecks, whether people or product, can be seen quickly for fast resolution. Additionally, the information needed to optimize product development processes is available and clearly presented for ready analysis.

Supply Chain Collaboration provides extensive supplier collaboration and synchronization capabilities—a key factor for success in today’s complex manufacturing environments. Arena has developed three specific solutions for collaboration and interaction with the OEM’s supply chain. These solutions provide unique capabilities designed to address the varied requirements of product development enterprises and are designed to work seamlessly with Arena PLM.

Supplier Collaboration is designed for trusted partners. Partners login to access

Arena PLM for key processes like ECO review and approval, quality responses, and accessing the latest product data. It provides a secure, flexible environment

Arena Demand is designed to provide increased procurement visibility and negotiating power

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for an OEM to work dynamically with its suppliers and enables each of them to participate directly in product development design and approval process.

Arena Exchange enables OEMs to invite an unlimited number of supply chain

partners (and their extended suppliers) to review and collaborate around a single, industry standard, Product Definition eXchange (PDX) file or build package. To maximise flexiblity, it is compatible with any enterprise PLM system that can export a PDX file. A build package is the set of drawings, bills of material, item masters, assembly instructions, approved manufacturers lists, and other documentats required to describe product design data to the supply chain partners. Suppliers can review build package data, provide feedback through an integrated commenting stream, and approve or reject objects such as change orders.

A key benefit for Arena Exchange is that it requires only a single OEM license to enable unlimited partner participation and eliminates user provisioning or user administration. External users are limited to accessing only information contained within the single PDX file to which they are authorized—thus enhancing security by protecting both the company’s and its suppliers’ IP from unauthorized use or dissimination.

Arena Scribe is a next generation, easy to use, social media-oriented

collaboration solution that aggregates a product’s complete development history. It provides a digital slate to socialize, record and share information among all stakeholders across the supply chain, including suppliers and partners, to take part in documented problem solving and discussions in the context of the product record. Team members can begin Scribe collaboration threads on Arena product, project, and quality data—inviting other team members to participate as needed. Each receives email and dashboard alerts for Scribe collaborations they are “following” and can “un-follow” at any time as activities and needs change. Scribe is an intuitive application designed to require little or no formal training. Email and dashboard alerts keep hot topics front and center. Suppliers with access to the underlying objects can be invited to any public Scribe session, not only participating in the dialogue, but they may also view comments in sessions that are marked public. This leverages the extended team to accelerate resolution of issues.

Integration solutions ensure Arena’s PLM solutions will work effectively and

cross functionally within and across an enterprise. Arena understands that its solutions must exchange information and processes with other key business applications and systems. To enable this, Arena has a partner community that builds, delivers, and supports integrations to multiple business and authoring systems. Integrations are available for MCAD (e.g., SOLIDWORKS) and ERP (e.g. NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign, Microsoft Dynamics, Kenandy). EDA integrations include Mentor Graphics, Altium, and OrCAD. Arena also has integrations with elecronic part management applications including

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SiliconExpert for Electronic Component Data & Parts Management and Octopart for Electronic Parts Search. An integration with PingOne provides a tier-one cloud Single Sign-On (SSO) solution.

Arena has tools that companies can use to create solutions unique to their environment and operations. These include a comprehensive API set for development of custom integrations while Arena DataExtract enables a company to create an automated extract process for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) operations such as reporting, business intelligence, or analytical tools that they use.

Arena’s Integration Monitoring and Maintenance Tool provides visibility into integration status and enables companies to configure multiple integrations to track specific items, BOMs, and assign maintenance responsibilities. Features include the ability to track whether the integration is up-to-date, how many updates are queued for reconciliation, if the integration needs attention, or if the integration itself has been disabled.

User Case Studies

This section presents case studies that illustrate Arena’s product scope and scalability.

Nutanix, a San Jose-based company, creates a virtualized platform for public

and private cloud infrastructure. Acording to David Sangster, Senior Vice President of Operations at Nutanix, “Change management was a nightmare. With several people making changes and suggestions to uncontrolled documents there were multiple revisions of the same BOM flying around the ether. No one had any trust in the data, so many local copies abounded based on the ‘mine is right’ premise. We chose Arena for the following reasons:

• The pay-per-use model is affordable with no large initial cash outlays or costly IT or software administration overhead to manage or proctor the tool.

• Integrates easily with our existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system NetSuite, eliminating hours of tedious, error prone clerical work.

• Provides cost visibility to engineering to allow them to consider design/cost tradeoffs.

• Scales with the global business—we don’t want to revisit this decision every year. • Our suppliers now access the same BOM and revision, and we have had zero

wrong BOMs built since the system was implemented. Configuration integrity is assured.”

As advice to others, Mr. Sangster recommends a cloud-based PLM solution that can be up and running quickly. “You have a business to run and don’t need the distraction of a lengthy implementation cycle,” he advises.

Ruckus Wireless focuses on addressing the issue of reliable and predictable

Wi-Fi performance and bridging the gap between high-end and consumer-grade

“You have a business to run and don’t need the distraction of a lengthy implementation cycle”

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equipment. They were looking for a PLM infrastructure that offered the company a high level of control and help it avoid potentially costly errors related to manual processes. In addition, Ruckus needed this system to scale as the company grew larger, to support new product offerings, and expand into new markets. Today Arena PLM serves as a central repository for all of the company’s data and a platform on which everyone can find what they need, when they need it.

“Arena allows our extended enterprise—from America to Malaysia to Taiwan— to easily view and update product information and see its current status,” said David Hom, Document Control Manager at Ruckus Wireless. “It’s a much more efficient way to manage our manufacturing and change processes. Now we all know the information is completely accurate and up-to-date.”

Argus Imaging BV, owned by Philips Healthcare, is a supplier to the image

intensifiers market. Argus serves as the single source for Philips image intensifiers and medical camera subsystems in both the initial and after care market. Product data had previously been divided into three different databases and systems, which has now been centralized to one system: Arena PLM. All product and R&D documents are centrally accessible to engineers and document control. The compliance documents are now at the right level in the bill of material recorded in Arena, which allows quick and easy reporting on compliance with the push of a button.

Emiel Gubbels, Director of Q&R at Argus Imaging, stated “Because Arena is delivered on demand, it does not require additional IT infrastructure, which adds up to a big cost advantage over traditional client / server software. “There is no dedicated server and we do not have to worry about fixes and updates.”

For more information on Arena Solutions use cases please visit

http://www.arenasolutions.com/arena-case-studies/.

Concluding Remarks

Today’s highly competitive global markets require the ability to quickly adapt to changes in business, product mix, market demands, and partnership relations in order to improve market position. Organizations require product development environments that are flexible and scalable and that can be easily delivered across diverse, distributed environments.

With a secure, highly-scalable multi-tenant cloud-based service, Arena has developed a broad PLM solution suite that provides the ability to quickly and cost effectively deploy fully integrated PLM capabilities for innovative enterprises and their supply chain partners. Customers have the flexibility to start with the basic capabilities they need and easily add or plug in new, more complex functionality that will grow their product development environment as their needs grow—or contract. Arena’s supply chain solutions enable enterprises to adapt to changes without imposing major costs on themselves or their

Arena has developed a broad PLM solution suite that provides the ability to quickly and cost

effectively deploy fully integrated PLM capabilities

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partners. Often, Arena PLM can be self-implemented for small enterprises and an IT staff is not necessary to deploy, run, or maintain it. With its cloud centric solution, Arena also has the ability to evolve and scale to meet the requirements of both SMBs and large multi-national enterprises.

CIMdata believes that Arena provides a cost effective PLM solution suite that can meet the needs of many manufacturers. Companies of all sizes that are looking to implement or expand their PLM and product development environment should include Arena Solutions in their evaluations.

About CIMdata

CIMdata, an independent worldwide firm, provides strategic management consulting to maximize an enterprise’s ability to design and deliver innovative products and services through the application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). CIMdata provides world-class knowledge, expertise, and best-practice methods on PLM. CIMdata also offers research, subscription services, publications, and education through international conferences.

To learn more about CIMdata’s services, visit our website at http://www.CIMdata.com or contact CIMdata at: 3909 Research Park Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, USA. Tel: +1 734.668.9922. Fax: +1 734.668.1957; or at Oogststraat 20, 6004 CV Weert, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 (0) 495.533.666.

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