Arena Solutions today announced Arena Quality, a new solution that enables the entire discreet engineering and manufacturing team to rapidly identify, capture, collaborate and resolve product quality problems.
Quality processes are directly connected to the product record in Arena PLM, which provides everyone with complete visibility into quality issues. Engineering, operations and the supply chain can fully participate in problem resolution and learn from experience to drive continuous improvement. And because Arena Quality captures all quality processes in an easily navigated history, customers will always be audit ready for ISO (International Organization for Standardization), FDA and other organizations.
Quality has been a high priority for all companies since the 1980s, when Japan's better quality products came dominate a wide array of market segments. Today, discrete engineering and manufacturing teams strive for continuous improvement, and to consistently produce ever higher quality, organizations need stronger quality processes. Weak and disorganized quality processes typically result in poor quality products.
The spreadsheet and paper-based systems on which many teams still depend provide poor visibility into quality issues across the supply chain team. In fact, these kinds of systems completely break down in the face of today's highly complex products. And unlike Arena Quality, which is embedded in the product record, traditional quality management software solutions are often isolated from the product record, leading to confusion and conflict between the quality team and other product teams.
Arena customers have used Arena PLM as to control their product designs and collaborate with their supply chains for nearly a decade. Now, Arena Quality enables them to manage the complete quality process to speed time to market, produce products at an ever-higher level of quality, improve margin, reduce scrap, and increase productivity and efficiency.
Capabilities of Arena Quality include:
- Create and customize templates to support quality processes: The solution provides complete control over phases, attributes and terminology to reflect each individual organization's internal quality process. It also eliminates the need to start from scratch; templates get organizations up and running quickly.
- Assign work, collaborate and see progress: Arena Quality makes it easy to assign responsibility at multiple levels, manage schedules, track progress and drive to final resolution. Quality processes are readily visible in the product record, making everyone aware of outstanding issues. Emailed notifications are shown in the Arena Quality dashboard.
- Explicit phase closure with 21 CFR Part 11 compliant electronic signatures: There's no need to print and manage hard copies. Arena's electronic signature capability has final sign-off covered.
- Persistent history: A complete history of quality processes, down to field level edits, is captured in Arena Quality for audit needs.
"We know our customers have teams who are dedicated to constantly drive for continuous improvement in the design, manufacturing and logistical processes," said Steve Chalgren, Arena's vice president of product management and strategy. "With this new solution, Arena makes quality a visible and integrated part of the product design and delivery process, enabling the quality teams to bring everyone together to identify and solve problems."
