Customers Drive Fall 2007 Release of Arena PLM

Wouldn't it be cool to have a wish list of features and have some mechanism for getting them into the next major release of your PLM software?

That's the theme of Arena Solutions Inc.'s Fall 2007 release of Arena PLM, its on-demand PLM offering, which is upgraded two to three times annually. While the last few releases were all about expanding the system's footprint, this latest upgrade is centered on making existing functionality more useable and accessible to customers. The software is offered with a Fast Feedback feature, a pseudo suggestion box made available to users within every page of the application. This provides them with a forum to present ideas or enhancement requests in real time directly within the PLM software.

"We went through the suggestion box and took the 70 most relevant enhancement requests from customers and put them into this release," says Mark Holman, senior vice president of operations for Arena, in Foster City, CA. The enhancements affect all functional areas of Arena PLM, including change management, compliance, supplier management and project collaboration.

For example, the new release has features which aid in making the software more configurable, an on-going complaint many have voiced when it comes to on-demand applications or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Typically, on-demand programs get kudos for their ease-of-use capabilities and fast deployment. However, the trade-off is that customers have access to the same flavor of software without any ability to tailor the package to meet their business needs.

The Arena PLM Fall 2007 release addresses those complaints with features that make the program more configurable, Holman says. As a result, one company might specify product revisions be handled in a certain manner in terms of checking for compliance, while another firm could have the option to treat the compliance check totally differently.

Search is another area benefiting from improvements. Fueled by popular demand, the Fall 2007 release applies categorization capabilities to search so users can think about and search for parts in groups - for example, parsing a complex Bill of Materials (BOM) to look at all plastic parts. The categorization feature has also been applied to the change management process, so customers can set up categories of change groups. "That way, all plastic parts go through one change process, while newly introduced parts go through another and Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) parts go through still a different approval process," Holman says.