Arena Solutions provides cloud-based bill of materials (BOM) and change management software for small and midsize hi-tech manufacturers. Its suite of cloud applications, including BOMControl, PartsList, and PDXViewer, enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and streamline supply chains. Engineers looking to streamline BOM creation and management will find important new functions in the fall 2012 release of Arena Solutions’ cloud-based BOMControl system. Read the rest of this entry »

Arena PLM is moving further into the area the company is good at, and leveling the playing field for smaller hi-tech/electronics firms to be able to play with big boys. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises in a strategic sense. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS & IMPLEMENTATIONS

Girl Scouts of the USA selects NetSuite ERP
Industry tags: Non-profit organizations
“Shifting software systems to the cloud is a current trend for organizations of many types, especially for non-manufacturing and service management organizations. Girl Scouts of the USA is a great example of such a move. Dispersed across the country, the organization needs to provide system access to all its councils, and support warehousing and e-commerce functionality to run its online store. Cloud ERP software allows organizations to quickly adopt such technology without incurring high upfront expenses.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• NetSuite ERP profile

Midsize pharmaceutical company Pernix Therapeutics Holding Inc. selects CDC’s Ross ERP
Industry tags: Pharmaceutical and Botanical Products, Life and Natural Sciences
“Pernix has wound up its ERP product selection with Ross ERP of CDC Software. The company’s key expectations for the new software include facilitating business growth, improving efficiency and compliance, reducing costs, and mitigating risks. Certain data quality validation processes are also slated for improvement, and traceability will be increased. Ross ERP is a software designed for such types of businesses, and is certainly capable of supporting process manufacturing specifics. See my recent Certification Report for more details on Ross ERP.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Ross ERP profile
• Ross ERP vs. Infor, IFS, Lawson…

Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project (NVIRP) selects Agresso ERP
Industry tags: Construction
“NVIRP is a state-owned entity that plans, designs, and delivers irrigation renewal projects for Australia’s Northern Victoria Region. It is a large multi-directional infrastructure project that required management via modern ERP software. NVIRP performed a deep and thorough software selection process, resulted in its selection of Agresso ERP as its core supporting software. The system’s flexibility, transparency, and ability to respond rapidly to changing requirements were the central points of the software selection that allowed Unit4 to win versus tier-one vendors.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Agresso ERP profile
• NVIRP backgrounder

Read the rest of this entry »

For over a decade, Arena Solutions has been redefining the product lifecycle management (PLM) space with a suite of cloud applications that enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to work better together — from first prototype to full-scale production. In 2000, the two co-founders founded bom.com, a Web-based application for managing items, bills of material (BOMs), and engineering changes (this was the world’s first cloud-native PLM system).

In 2002, bom.com changed its name to Arena Solutions and expanded into a full engineering change order (ECO) management and collaboration tool that is used by thousands of people, including seven of the top ten contract manufacturers in the world. Arena has helped hundreds of innovative manufacturers bring better products to market faster with its cloud offerings that speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and help them collaborate on product changes with strategic partners across the globe. The vendor has over 500 corporate customers, 20,000 individual users, and millions of BOMs in the system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises, to a strategic degree. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

In the deluge of news revolving mainly around the Big Five product lifecycle management (PLM) vendors, i.e., Siemens PLM, Dassault Systemes, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), Oracle Agile PLM, and SAP PLM, hardly any noise comes from smaller PLM providers in the lower end of the market. To be certain, many smaller PLM players, who had been catering to the mid-market, such as former MatrixOne or Agile Software, have lately been gobbled up by their larger counterparts.

Thus, in addition to Arena Solutions and its pure on-demand PLM offering as well as Aras’ open source PLM offering, the only other viable choice for smaller enterprises remains Omnify Software. Privately held Omnify Software is headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (US), with another US office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog post analyzed the white paper entitled “Manufacturing Outsourcing: Seven Common Pitfalls to Avoid” , authored by Symphony Consulting and Arena Solutions. It also established an intrinsic connection with product lifecycle management (PLM) software technology as a global sourcing collaboration enabler.

Indeed, several macroeconomic trends seem to be helping the PLM market, starting with the rampant offshoring of facilities and/or expansion of outsourcing and contract manufacturing overseas. There are also escalating mergers and acquisitions (M&As) within multiple business sectors and the inexorable spate of regulatory and compliance mandates within many industries and geographic regions.

This dovetails into the relentless pressure for companies to innovate and bring ever more functional (if not even “ever-cooler”) products, that have ever-shorter lifecycles, ever more quickly get to the market, and thus differentiate, especially in the electronics/high-tech and consumable packaged goods (CPG) sectors. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of TEC blog posts have discussed benefits but also the inevitable caveats of white papers (including all too common vendors’ self-serving marketing fluff and buzzword verbiage), and about their (un)intended audiences. These posts have even caused some heated debates with other blogging sites and experts on white papers, and I am going to stay away from all that here.

My intention here is rather to acknowledge that, as part of my daily routine of doing research on vendors and their strategies and offerings, I’ve read a ton of white papers in the last decade or so. And yes, these have ranged from vendors’ blatant bragging about their capabilities (a la the “Every man thinks his own geese swans” proverb) to some exceptional ones that were quite educational and established someone’s expertise in something.

One latter example would be the white paper entitled “Manufacturing Outsourcing: Seven Common Pitfalls to Avoid” and authored by Symphony Consulting and Arena Solutions. Why? Read the rest of this entry »