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Arena and Partner eBOM Solve Sweden’s PLM Needs

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Arena’s global success depends in no small part on our partners around the world who understand the unique needs of the international markets they represent. One such partner is the Swedish-based company eBOM. According to Vice President Daniel Nihlén, eBOM was founded in 2010 to help companies understand how to best leverage product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to improve efficiencies.  And now that Arena offers a product development platform, which includes QMS, ALM, and supply chain collaboration functionality rolled up with PLM, our joint story has become all the more compelling.

In part two of the three-part interview with Daniel, he discusses why more European manufacturers chose Arena’s product development platform to manage their product development processes. 

Arena: How does Arena’s all-in-one product development platform compare to other single purpose PLM solutions? 

Daniel: From a functional perspective, almost all our customers wanted to solve the problem and hassles of managing changes of multiple Excel spreadsheets for product families and variants when they are introduced and changed. This is something most of our competitors do too, but our customers also want to improve the total effectiveness of collaboration on the complete product record and be able to easily and securely involve their supply chain in this collaboration. To orchestrate all this, they also need an industry best practice for engineering change review and engineering change order (ECR/ECO) that lets the suppliers be involved if needed. This is all standard functionality in Arena’s platform and gives me as a reseller a huge competitive advantage.

Arena: Tell me what are the important features, functionality and benefits customers are looking for from a PLM solution? 

Daniel: From a strategic perspective, customers look for a solution that requires the lowest implementation threshold possible in terms of resources, risk and investments. Most of our customers are fast moving and are very streamlined organizations. They won’t and can’t set aside a huge amount of resources to work with implementation of a PLM solution, and they grow so rapidly they often need the implementation lead time to be ‘instant’. And we can deliver that as Arena is a “ready to deploy solution” that requires neither installation nor any programming. We configure, migrate data and train staff with a quick start implementation at a fixed price.

Arena: Do you find that the challenges that manufacturers face in Sweden are unique compared to manufacturers in other markets? 

Daniel: All customers are unique, but the pain they face is highly emblematic of manufacturers of complex product with an outsourced supply chain.

Arena: What are the features and functionality of Arena’s all-in-one platform that customers find the most compelling? 

Daniel: Besides the super strong standard features in BOMControl, customers really liked Arena Quality to get Quality processes as a fully integrated part of their product record, as well as the integration between Octopart and SiliconExpert for strategic component selection and management. 

Arena: What feedback have you received on Arena’s specific features and functionalities that have made a difference for customers?  

Daniel: The basic features of Item, File and BOM management for the complete product and the change management functionality in combination with the unique capabilities of the multi-tenant SaaS cloud architecture to let everyone, anywhere, securely access the data is what helps these customers resolve product development challenges swiftly.

If you are a manufacturer or outsourcer in Scandinavia interested in speaking to Daniel about how Arena can help your company, please click here.