CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 February 2007
Product News
Arena Solutions Brings New Strategic Benefits to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) With Winter '07 Release of Arena PLM
Arena Solutions announced its Winter '07 release of Arena PLM, featuring significant new Project Collaboration functionality. Project Collaboration leverages the application's strong foundation of product definition and product management functionality to create a whole new layer of product analytics in Arena PLM. This layer elevates the value of PLM, adding strategic benefits to the traditional efficiency-based ones by providing the visibility that manufacturers need to better launch new products on time and on budget.
Project Collaboration in Arena PLM provides manufacturers with a 360-degree view of their product projects, from the portfolio to the project to the individual item level. For the first time manufacturers can tie project plans to the product record by linking task, milestone and deadline information directly to each individual item included in a project. These links streamline project planning and execution and result in project information being automatically updated when product information is updated. The on-demand Arena PLM platform makes those links even more valuable by enabling all members of the extended product team -- from internal employees to global supply chain partners -- to participate in projects. Together these features give users an unprecedented level of visibility that enables them to identify project risks, pinpoint issues, gauge their effect -- and react in real-time to avoid problems and preserve schedules.
"As a long-time user of Arena PLM, I've experienced essentially every upgrade to the application, and what I appreciate most -- in addition to the seamless way that upgrades automatically appear -- is that new features are designed and integrated in a way that actually works," said Fritz Morgan, chief technology officer at Color Kinetics , a leading innovator of lighting technologies that was just named, for the second year in a row, to Forbes' annual list of the country's 25 fastest growing technology companies. "From what I've seen, Project Collaboration will be no exception. With the ability to tie projects to products -- and then have the whole team access that interrelated information -- it promises to provide the visibility we need to keep our ever-expanding portfolio of products shipping on time."
In a recent study of more than 150 mid-market manufacturers, Arena found that most manufacturers currently manage their product-related projects with desktop tools like Microsoft® Excel and Microsoft® Project (70% and 68%, respectively), often in combination with homegrown solutions or off-the-shelf tools designed for other purposes. However, very few respondents were satisfied with their current set-up: Only 4% of these manufacturers considered their existing tools and processes effective for planning product-related projects, while just 7% felt they were effective for project execution and analysis.
A significant majority of the shortcomings they named were in the realm of new product development (NPD) and new product introduction (NPI), with 92% of respondents facing challenges that impact those processes. Some specific challenges, cited at the following rates, included:
• Poor coordination and communication across product teams (66%)
• Lack of visibility into constraints and bottlenecks (59%)
• Lack of infrastructure for standardizing processes and refining best practices (55%)
• Difficulty including suppliers and partners in project planning and execution (48%)
Project Collaboration is designed to directly address these and other shortcomings by:
• Enabling the entire extended team to access the same complete product and project information, keep their own status information up-to-date and monitor the progress of relevant tasks
• Offering many views into project status, from executive dashboards to detailed, item-by-item, task-by-task schedule views, all of which make it easy to identify issues from the moment they threaten to cause problems
• Offering a framework for modeling processes and creating templates that can be used, re-used, duplicated and modified as often as companies require
• Leveraging the on-demand platform and sophisticated access model of Arena PLM to engage all parties, from inside and outside company walls, at the appropriate level of participation
"Winter '07 is the most significant release of Arena PLM since we first launched six years ago," said Michael Topolovac, chief executive officer at Arena Solutions. "Our customers have always been thrilled with how PLM improves their engineering and manufacturing processes, but they're consistently frustrated that no tool has delivered the same benefits in the realm of project planning, execution and analysis. We wanted to fix that problem the right way -- in the same system that already manages the product record -- and that required fundamental change that would provide unprecedented visibility. The question 'When is my product going to ship?' is not a new one for manufacturers. What is new is that they can now answer it -- accurately and reliably."
Project Collaboration can be used to manage any type of project, from NPD and NPI to quality improvement, compliance, cost reduction, sourcing and more. The new features are included in the Enterprise Edition of Arena PLM and will be automatically available, at no additional cost, to existing customers. The new release will be unveiled during a live online launch event on Thursday, February 8, 2007, at 10:00 am PST. Anyone interested in attending the event can register by going to the Arena Solutions website at http://www.arenasolutions.com/ and clicking "Winter '07 Launch Event -- Register Today." After February 8, an archived recording of the event will be available for download from the site.
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