Arena Demo

We have been using the demo system that was nicely provided by Arena Solutions, and we found a very interesting feature called the where used view. What this allows you to do is find where a component is used and then select that parent component. Something else you should notice, is that the item number that is listed is a specific revision. Thus, the change tracking and management capability within Arena allows a component to be part of one revision but not necessarily part of another. This allows the tracking of the lifecycle of a part through its association with different parent components.

Now we select that parent item and are taken directly to it.

So now we know one of the highest-level products that uses this subcomponent. If we want to see the costing of this router, we can select the costing tab, and we can see a number of different cost items.

We can also find out the history of this item by going to the revisions tab.

What this tells us is at a glance where the item is in the product lifecycle. This is particularly beneficial is even a person unfamiliar with this product of the PLM process can tell both the lifecycle workflow for this company for this product, and where this product currently stands.

Here are the modified views, with notes so that we can see where the status of different views is.

We just learned a huge amount about this product and it only took a few screen views that were easy to naviage to. Remember, this all began with the where used view.

To learn about the webcentic model that Arena is following, see this post.

http://supplychaininnovation.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/supply-chain-software-and-the-google-model/