Arena and EMA Integration: An Engineer’s Dream Come True

Arena formed a strategic alliance that combines our PLM solution with EMA’s data management solution for Cadence® OrCAD® that will benefit users of both systems, especially engineers.

Engineers are sure to find this integration more compelling than the director’s cut of Blade Runner, more liberating than a swig of RedBull, and more fun than a bowl of peanut M&Ms.

The OrCAD and Arena PLM integration provides a number of benefits for organizations using both systems. Components from the enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) system are available directly within the OrCAD Capture CIS design environment making search, selection, and placement of parts very simple.  Parts listed as obsolete in the PLM system can be easily identified and swapped out in advance in an OrCAD design.

According to Manny Marcano, president and CEO of EMA, many EMA customers are already using Arena PLM today.  “By establishing this strategic alliance, our mutual customers can be assured that their product lifecycle data and their work in progress engineering data are in sync and work together as a unified system,” said Marcano.

In an exclusive three-part series, Marcano describes the many ways this amazing integration benefits engineers and the organizations they represent.  This conversation is a look into the past, present and future of product design.

Arena: How does this integration make life easier for manufacturers?

EMA:  This integration helps customers consolidate the number of data sources they need to reference when they’re working on a design. Linking their ECAD design environment to their PLM system provides a couple of benefits. From an end-user perspective, they get to stay in the OrCAD environment, so they don’t have to step out and learn a totally different tool. And from a management perspective, it gives them confidence that end-users are leveraging the organization’s core system to manage their critical product information.

Arena: Allowing engineers to access Arena data in the OrCAD environment would definitely seem to streamline development and accelerate business results. What are your thoughts on this?

EMA: Absolutely. We are increasing the speed and efficiency of the engineers ECAD design environment, which expedites their time to market. Engineers typically spend hours trying to find components — they do a design and then they leave the design to ensure they chose the correct parts; so we are basically aiding the engineers to pick parts approved in Arena, enabling easy access to information. This cuts down their design time and overall time to market.

Arena: I hear from many engineers that searching for part information can be an exhausting distraction from focusing on design.

EMA: When engineers pick a part, they need to know electrical characteristics, tolerance, voltage, etc. In addition, they need access to business information, such as: Is it approved? Is it orderable? If business and parts information live in two different systems, you’ve got an engineer jumping back and forth between systems trying to figure out if they can use this part — and that usually leads to a huge opportunity for error— not to mention a lot of time wasted.

Arena is excited by this partnership and the impact it will have on engineers. Stay tuned for Part II of our conversation with Manny where we get his view on the “perfect utopian development environment” for engineers.