Arena Puts Power in the Hands of Energy & Utility Companies

Energy demands will double in the next 20 years. Population growth, pollution and limited natural resources have created an urgent need to innovate to make smarter, cleaner and more energy efficient products.

Compounding the challenge to innovate is that energy, oil and gas companies must reduce costs and streamline efficiencies within ever more strict quality and regulatory requirements. An inability to adapt to a rapidly changing market means continued margin erosion—or worse.

New sector challenges require new product development (NPD) solutions that are easy to use, affordable, fleet of foot and nimble.

Arena provides utility companies an all-in-one product development platform to answer the rigors of compliance, avoid costly mistakes and lay out a path to maximize their competitive advantage. Arena’s platform unifies quality management (QMS) and application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities with supply chain collaboration and product lifecycle management (PLM) into the same single solution for ease of use and thereby stripping away all interoperability issues which could occur if one attempted to bandage together disparate solutions through integrations.

A PLM solution with embedded application lifecycle management ALM and quality management solution QMS streamlines processes, reduces the need to toggle between clumsily integrated siloed systems and mitigates errors.

Can you imagine if your processes forced you to log in every time you toggled from Microsoft office or a browser? It would certainly lower your productivity. Think about it: login, make changes, logout—then repeat with each solution. With Arena, there’s no need to toggle back and forth—all of your critical information is available on your computer screen at the same time.

Utility companies and their suppliers can identify quality issues, collaborate on resolutions and document the action plan from within a single quality process in a proactive manner. Now, when a part fails inspection, a quality inspector can create an Arena quality object—a non-conformance material report (NCMR), supplier corrective action request (SCAR), or a corrective action preventive action (CAPA)—directly within Arena. And the beautiful part is that it’s all tied out to the product record.

With Arena PLM, engineering teams in the utilities industry have complete visibility with links between components and suppliers for all quality issues upstream and downstream as they assess the part for future product inclusion. Impacted teams will be able to proactively analyze products returned from the field against the component’s design specifications and factory inspection data, driving a closed-loop quality process from manufacturing, to field repair, to the engineering team, to optimize product manufacturing quality and reduce field repair costs.

Your entire cross-functional team including supply chain partners can see quality actions and participate in resolving issues quickly.

Due to the lack of visibility with siloed systems, problems escalate quickly; for instance, what if the part is no longer available (i.e. end of life) or does not meet the compliance requirements? What if there was an alternative part that would have worked just as well and engineering just didn’t know about it?

Both these scenarios can cost a utilities company significant time and money.

Arena’s suite of solutions is designed to enable utility companies to collaborate in the design, development and even retirement of energy products. Arena helps energy companies embrace disruptive change and navigate an increasingly complicated landscape.

You just find Arena’s product development platform “electrifying” (reference to the musical Grease – ed.). Or read a beautifully written whitepaper: How Arena is Helping Clean Tech See More Green.