Make Hard Business Decisions Easy With DataExtract

Heightened insight into business processes enables companies to take proactive improvement actions. In a world of ever-growing big data, getting the correct data, accurately and consistently, is the first step in asking the right questions for continual process improvements. This is especially true for manufacturers who require their product lifecycle management (PLM) process data to be easily available for external reporting, analysis, and data warehousing tools as well as downstream system consumption.

The problem with out-of-the-box reporting capabilities for many other PLM solutions is that they are neither complete nor provide the level of configurability that is desired. Therefore, PLM customers have resorted to cobbling together reports written against their PLM data. Unfortunately, this requires internal IT teams to spend an enormous amount of time creating these reports—running them manually each time thereafter. Another option for OEMs is to embrace standard reporting solutions that require writing complicated and cumbersome database queries.

OEMs need extraction solutions that are flexible and can generate accurate and timely ad hoc data, as well as routine auto-generated runs. To enable companies to extract their data quickly and easily, Arena is launching Arena PLM DataExtract.

Arena PLM DataExtract provides the ability to extract Arena product data for use in business intelligence and analytics systems. As a result, DataExtract provides heightened insight into your PLM processes by gaining visibility into metrics, trends, and bottlenecks. These insights provide the fact-based answers to questions about your business processes.

The extractions can be scheduled to run manually or automatically using Arena’s Application Programming Interface (API).

Arena received requests from PLM customers for a data extraction solution that would be “easy to install, flexible, and with robust capabilities to develop reporting/analytics templates.” In addition, the solution had to be “easy to deploy, maintain, and migrate from their PLM solution to another business system.” Listening to the needs and challenges of our customers guided us in the creation of DataExtract.

With Arena DataExtract, process data (Changes, Requests, Quality, Projects) can now be easily pulled in an automated fashion, eliminating time consuming and error-prone manual steps. Auto-extraction is performed identically each time, resulting in consistent output for easier consumption.

With this data, you can explore your business for the metrics you need to know to improve cycle times, reduce costs, and make better decisions.

DataExtract enables Arena PLM customers to extract data and manage scheduling easily from Arena PLM. And DataExtract’s seamless coupling with Arena API enables customers to take that data and integrate it with all their enterprise business systems. This enables you to analyze the data while eliminating the unnecessary time and errors of reentering data from system to system. DataExtract makes exporting data for hard business decisions—easy.

Evaluating a BI tool?

Arena suggests asking the following questions before selecting a reporting and analytics (BI) solution for their PLM system:

• Does the solution have pure web-capable, open standards-based architecture?
• Does the solution provide tight integration with a PLM solution?
• Does it leverage the underlying object model, context, logic, and the domain?
• Does the solution provide an ability to use/leverage the PLM solution’s security model?
• Can the solution use the native API of the PLM solution so there is no need to access production databases directly?
• Can the solution work without a need for a data warehouse?
• Is it easy to create dashboards to track key performance indicators?
• What is the time to implement?
• Does the solution have an ability to extract data from multiple systems (on the web) without needing a data warehouse?