Arena
Arena is a centralized system of record for controlling and selectively sharing product information, including bills of materials (BOMs), part specifications, cost data, compliance status and change orders. Arena gets quality products to market on time and on budget by giving small and mid-size manufacturers a collaborative environment for centralizing, controlling and analyzing complex and constantly changing product information.
The repository for the product record, Arena sits at the epicenter of the broader product lifecycle management (PLM) landscape, connecting with systems like CAD, EDA, PDM and ERP and linking organizations with their supply chains. With its on-demand, software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach, Arena is a low-risk, rapid-return proposition that makes enterprise-class functionality available to companies that would otherwise have to contend with manual, time-consuming and error-prone product data management processes.
Central Product Record
Arena enables even the most highly distributed organizations to ensure all product team members have access to current product information by providing persistent access to a single, revision-controlled product record containing all items, BOMs, files, costs/quotes and sourcing relationships (i.e., AVL/AML). Once invited to participate, authorized users have access according to role-based privileges that allow them to view, update or add to the product record. You can associate a virtually unlimited number of documents in any file format with an item and import or export information in multiple formats.
Throughout the entire product lifecycle, Arena tracks complete change and revision history, and allows you to subscribe to automatic notifications associated with your items, so you always know when changes occur, and it’s always easy to identify the latest, most current version of the product record.
Product Management
With Arena you quickly and easily invite an unlimited number of suppliers, partners and contract manufacturers into your collaboration workspace without the headaches typically associated with behind-the-firewall applications. Regardless of organizational boundaries, Arena provides consistent support for collaborative request and change processes through centrally managed, user-defined workflow automation that supports the way your company does business. The Arena closed-loop framework allows requests to be escalated or grouped into change orders, preserving collaboration history and context for future use. You can define unlimited tracking codes and specify flexible evaluation and review groups for the routing of workflow notices. You can also add files and notes relating to how a change should be implemented in the workspace. Out of the box, Arena provides common-sense rules to mitigate blind revisioning and ensure staged routing, so lower-level approvals must be obtained before routing to the next stage.
Product Analytics
Arena provides instant visibility into product, project and compliance status and enables you to quickly investigate issues and analyze problems by drilling into Arena’s central product information repository at any assembly level, project step, or via compliance views tailored to individual reporting requirements. By providing users anywhere in the world a common framework and analytic toolkit, Arena enables you to drive accuracy, consistency, and timeliness across product management processes – even if your product definition is highly dynamic.
Using Arena you can track product development and new product introduction projects in real-time with instant reporting on items, costs, requests, and change orders providing an accurate, up-to-date view of progress to plan. You can also track thousands of detailed tasks or just a few critical project activities required to advance your products from one development phase to the next, and quickly identify and address chokepoints at any step in the project. For companies with compliance management needs, Arena allows you to track multiple environmental, industry and safety compliance requirements, document conformity assessments with evidence files, and provide instant compliance reporting. By using a convenient BOM view and optional interface to Avnet Promiere reference content, you can evaluate dynamic compliance and obsolescence data in the context of your assembly at any stage in the product lifecycle.
Customization
With Arena you can capture and organize information according to your needs, and then configure the way users view information and interact with each other. Best of all, Arena allows non-technical users the ability to do this in minutes without the headaches of writing code or hiring costly consultants. Using highly flexible and powerful categorization you can standardize information on items, files, and request and change processes. Define your own customer bills of materials that track the information that matters to your company. Define and enforce numbering conventions that have as much intelligence as required by the business. Collaborative workflow processes are entirely under your control. You determine the users, roles, routing sequence, and approval requirements for the various types of requests and changes you need. Regardless of how you customize Arena—whether you utilize Smart Layouts default views, add categorization and custom attributes, or leverage drag-and-drop customization tools—your changes will be preserved in future Arena upgrades.
Integration
The sophisticated, flexible Arena 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. Arena tracks the items and BOMs you select, and a monitoring feature indicates when those 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.
