PLM specialists drop the bom

Bom.com has officially changed its corporate name to Arena Solutions, and the company's website has been relocated to www.arenasolutions.com.

Bom.com has officially changed its corporate name to Arena Solutions, and the company's website has been relocated to www.arenasolutions.com.

As a place where teams come together, "Arena" reflects the company's mission to help customers achieve competitive advantage through collaborative online solutions.

Along with the new name, Arena Solutions has outlined its vision for providing customers with a comprehensive PLM solution through an expanded product line and an extensive application integration strategy.

"We're proud of the momentum we've gained since introducing the industry's first online BOM management tool nearly two years ago", said Michael Topolovac, Chief Executive Officer of Arena Solutions.

"We've continually added new functionality since then, to the point where we've become a full PLM solution provider.

At the same time, a growing number of manufacturers in a wide range of industries have chosen Arena PLM to help them bring high-quality products to market faster and at a lower cost.

Our new name represents the expansion of our solution into an online arena where extended product teams collaborate efficiently throughout product design, manufacturing and maintenance".

PLM has become increasingly important as growing time-to-market and competitive pressures have made manufacturing more complex.

Without a PLM system, manufacturers must manually coordinate dynamic data and concurrent activities across geographically distributed teams and outsourced partners, which is typically a time-consuming and error-prone process.

PLM addresses these challenges by providing a centralised system of record for all product data.

In addition to managing information that previously was tracked in an ad hoc arrangement of single-user tools, PLM is the one system that can understand and provide visibility into the specialised types of product data that are authored and stored in enterprise resource planning (ERP), mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) and electronic design automation (EDA) tools.

This gives manufacturers a complete view of their products early in the development cycle, allowing better decision-making and resulting in tremendous efficiency gains and cost reductions.

Arena believes that a web-native PLM solution-that is, a system built from the ground up to be served over the Internet-can best address the challenges facing today's manufacturing organisations.

The web-native architecture of Arena PLM enables true collaboration across geographically distributed teams and provides real-time visibility into product data.

As a result, Arena customers achieve better control over complex development and manufacturing processes, while gaining the flexibility to adapt to dynamic market conditions and the demands of their businesses.

"PLM is the next long, difficult, but essential information technology deployment facing industry, and AMR has found that 27% of business users agreed that PLM was the enterprise application with the biggest influence on overall business", said Kevin O'Marah, Vice President of AMR Research, citing a December 2002 AMR Research Alert.

"From the top down, business unit leaders are looking to the convergence of the Internet communications platform and better-integrated enterprise applications to get faster to market with competitive products.

From the bottom up, highly educated (and paid) employees in engineering, design, marketing and product management are choosing and using technology tools that make their jobs easier".

AMR is optimistic that Arena Solutions is strongly positioned to capitalise on both of these trends as manufacturing organisations recognise the gains they can achieve by using a web-native PLM application, which provides very real advantages for managing changing product data and outsourcing design and manufacturing.

The online Arena PLM application also provides significant economic benefits to companies trying to do more with less during the down market, as it is instantly deployed, easily upgraded and quick to provide a return on investment.

The expanded Arena PLM solution combines the company's current and future products under one brand.

Arena PLM contains three application suites-Product Arena, Sourcing and Costing Arena and Integration Arena-each of which contains a range of modules to meet specific customer needs.

Arena Solutions also unveiled an extensive strategy for integrating Arena PLM with complementary software applications in order to enable real-time information exchange between Arena PLM and ERP, MCAD and EDA systems.

The Arena PLM solution includes three application suites: Product Arena, Sourcing and Costing Arena and Integration Arena.

For a limited time, Arena is bundling its Product Definition, Manufacturer Management, Vendor Management and Change Management modules for a one-time cost of $9995.

Those individual modules are normally available for a one-time cost of $4995 each.

User licenses are available for $995 per year with no setup or installation fees.

Customers can access Arena PLM from any computer with a web browser; there is no traditional software to install, maintain or upgrade.

New Arena customers can be up and running within days.

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