Virtual Change Control Boards Better Than Face to Face

Full transcript below:

Heatherly Bucher

Hello, everyone. My name is Heatherly Bucher. I am the Director of Product Marketing at Arena, and I will be the moderator for today’s session. I’d like to now introduce our great panel line-up for today. We have Tony Bairos, Director of Global Documentation and Training Compliance at Insulet; Cindy Lalowski, Senior Quality Systems Manager at AEye; Christine Pompa, Director of Quality Assurance at eMagin; and finally, George Lewis who is Arena’s Vice President of Business Development and Strategy, who’ll be chatting with our panelists today and leading them through the discussion. I’m going to pass the mic over to George to kick off today’s discussion. So, George, you are on.

George Lewis

Great. Thank you, Heatherly. So these are unusual times, and they’re certainly challenging the way we work. Supply chains have been disrupted around the world, testing our ability to allocate and produce goods on time. Quality issues are as costly as ever, yet they’re far more difficult to triage and resolve virtually. How can our product teams make decisions to design, develop, test, and manufacture new products when we can’t come together and meet face to face?

In this uncertain environment, it’s become necessary to reimagine how we communicate and collaborate in every aspect of our business. Today, we’re continuing in our series of events to help you navigate these uncharted waters. We’ll be sharing knowledge and best practices gained working with you over the last 20 years. In some events, like our April event, you’ll be hearing from Arena subject matter experts. In other events like today’s, you’ll hear from other Arena customers.

To help with the discussion, we’re going to launch a live poll now. We want to get a sense of how everyone is working together to make decisions now that we’re all virtual. If you’re tuning in from a web browser, you should now see the poll question on the right side of your screen. If you’re joining us from the Arena Events mobile app, look for the live poll option right below our video feed. And so poll question one is, “What’s been your biggest change control challenge?” Take a moment to complete the poll now, and we’ll circle back to discuss it here shortly.

But moving ahead, if you joined us for our first event in April, you saw this slide. We wanted to share it again for all of you who missed it at that event or maybe missed the event in general. We think it provides a great snapshot of how much our work lives have changed. In March, we asked you, our customers, to tell us—before 2020 and now. Not surprisingly, you told us how your work has almost flipped completely, going from mostly in the office to almost virtual 100% of the time. This isn’t the only reason we’re having this series of events, but we do believe that whatever the future product work is, it won’t be what it was before for most of us.

Okay, so let’s hear from our panel. The first question I’ve got for the group here is … let’s start with the idea of a perfect process. Many teams get stuck early trying to build the perfect process—put every possible decision and detail into the process all at once, roll it out to the team, and expect everything to be there on day one. Is this a reasonable goal, or in your experience is it best to begin with a simple process and then build them up or use some sort of ad hoc approach where you build up the change control board as needed? Christine, why don’t we start with you, any thoughts on that subject?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, thanks, George. It is so funny that you bring up this notion of perfection. I just attended a webinar on continuous improvement, and they mentioned the French proverb, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” I won’t even try to pronounce the French version. Anyway, we learned this firsthand at eMagin here, and I can think of one particular example. When we went to go launch our commercial part number control process in Arena, we set it up as one single routing, so all functions, one routing. They would review and approve at the same time and off we went. Now, as we moved through the process, we found that one particular group was using that information before the entire group reviewed the details. Now, as you can imagine, when you do a review of a bunch of different people, sometimes those details need to be changed and modified before you release the item.

Well, it actually created a pain point for them because they would have to go back and fix their inputs two and three times, based on the group’s feedback. So we actually set it up so that that particular group would be the second stage of the approval process, and that way they would have all the accurate details at the first point of entry. It really saved them a lot of mistakes and a lot of headaches, and it helped resolve a lot of confusion. I like to think about it as you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you wait to know everything, you’re never going to get there.

George Lewis

That’s great input Christine, appreciate the feedback. Tony, any thoughts on that subject?

Tony Bairos

Yeah. When I started at Insulet, the main job was to convert us from a paper system to an electronic system—so we were 100% paper. I believe the most important step when implementing a process or a system, an entire PLM system, is the sell. I spent the better part of a year just selling PLM around the whole organization, what it can do for us, what it can help us with, what it can fix, what it might not fix. The whole thing was to drum up excitement for the system before we even selected the PLM system.

I feel that another important step is bringing people in at a very early stage when defining or developing or designing a process. I’m a huge proponent of including all stakeholders at a very early stage. Because I feel like you get that emotional buy-in as you’re developing the process because everybody is involved from the get-go. I think there’s a huge danger in not including stakeholders at a very early stage. I have been part of implementations where the whole system is designed, developed, and almost ready to be rolled out and the stakeholders are brought in at the very late stage of the game. They get blindsided by it. They haven’t emotionally bought into it, and most of the time they fight it.

So I feel like emotional buy-in is so, so important. You just make everybody feel included in the solution all along, and they buy into it. They end up selling the system all across the organization for you. I’ve even noticed that with the success in the system in including everybody, that some of the biggest opponents of the system are the biggest proponents of the system now. They’re off asking, “What else can we bring into the system to move from paper to electronic? Can we bring it all in? Can we just do everything in Arena?” I think that one of the most important steps is the buy-in and the sell.

George Lewis

That’s great input, Tony. I mean, I’ve heard it as well where the emotional buy-in is key. In fact, some of those individuals that would resist deploying the solution perhaps initially are now eager to get the new workflows mapped into the solution as soon as possible, so that’s very encouraging. Cindy, from your perspective, anything to add here?

Cindy Lalowski

So actually I haven’t used a paper-based system since the ‘90s, so I’m well-versed in using Arena. I’ve used Arena almost since it was rolled out. I think really, as Tony said and Christine, working with everybody to get it set up and put in place from the get-go. We have some employees who have never used this type of system, and they just love it. They’ve come up to speed very well. So I think spending the time up front educating, training everybody how to use the system is very helpful. I agree with Tony, getting their buy-in. Sometimes you’re not going to get everybody, but it’s pretty easy when, hey, that’s the process. You need to use it. We process changes really quickly, so it is very well and very wisely accepted at AEye. That’s pretty much it.

George Lewis

Now that’s great feedback, Cindy, and from our other panelists as well. It’s all really good input for all the Arena customers to hear how you’re all doing things at your organizations.

So let’s take a look at the poll that everyone just responded to. The question was, “What’s been your biggest change control challenge?” Okay, interesting. The most popular answer is “ensuring people do their work in the process,” closely followed by “building a strong, perfect process.” We talked about some of these already as part of the discussion so far, but I think we can certainly tilt our discussion a little bit to include a little bit more on ensuring people do work in the process. We actually have a couple of questions on that specifically, so that’s really good feedback. Thanks, everybody.

Topic two, we know that most of us are living in an information overload situation, both at work and in our personal lives. I don’t know about you, but my email boxes, that’s plural, are often out of control. For change and design review processes, getting past any overload, getting people’s attention and participation is important. This dovetails right into that poll we had just asked. How do you build processes that get people’s attention and can scale as rate complexity increases along with unexpected shifts like moving to virtual, like it’s happened to all of us recently? Cindy, do you want to take the lead on this one?

Cindy Lalowski

Sure, be happy to. I think that when you build in a process and everybody gets used to that process, it flows very well. One of the processes that we have in place is that we’ve built in approval roles and routings for certain types of changes. We get everybody’s buy-in in terms of which routings they need to be included in. We also don’t like to babysit the process, so to speak. So when you just submit a change, it’s out there, it sits, it sits. There are always those one or two CCB members that, “Oh, I forgot,” or, “Oh, I didn’t see that one.” Well, we use the approval deadline. And so our normal process flow is 72 hours and our urgent process flow is 24 hours. And yes, for the urgents, we have to send a separate email, walk over and talk to the person, give them a text or a phone call because we normally have our suppliers or our contract manufacturers waiting to receive that change.

Everybody knows that they need to approve within the allotted time frame. If they don’t, they’re supposed to contact us and let us know that they need additional time. To enforce that, we’ve used the system, and we just simply let the change reject. We let it auto-reject. And then as everybody knows the way it works, it has to go back and get resubmitted and everybody has to reapprove. That helps to re-enforce the process, which I really like, and we don’t have to babysit. We also are involved heavily with onboarding and offboarding. So when a new person comes in, we ensure that they are trained. We ask their manager if they need to be included in certain types of changes for either approval or optional for information only. And then we also, for offboarding, as an employee leaves the company, we go back and we talk to that person’s manager to ensure that we have the appropriate approval roles covered. Since we’re an automotive company, we have a safety officer that needs to approve certain types of changes so we work really closely with that person as well. That’s about it.

George Lewis

That’s great. No, I love your self-correcting workflow, Cindy. That’s fantastic. Anything that makes things more proactive and puts the onus on the users to get their job done, I think is critical. Well done on that. Christine, how are you tackling at eMagin from the standpoint of getting people to participate in workflows and keeping everybody engaged?

Christine Pompa

We actually use a similar type of enforcement as Cindy when we process our customer purchase order review. So a 48-hour deadline and then a change administrator starts the follow-up process to make sure that everyone reviews and approves it. For the most part, we’re pretty good. We actually have encouraged our employees to use their dashboard to help manage their workload and get done what needs to get done in a timely manner. We actually spend about an hour with our employees when they come on board to get them familiar with Arena and with their dashboard. We help them to try to understand how to manage their assignments and get things done when they need to get them done. Some people still prefer to use emails to manage their workload, but we found if we introduce them to the dashboard it could open up another way to work. So between those two controls, we think we’ve put in some pretty good systems, and it seems to work really well for us.

George Lewis

That’s great. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, having a dashboard configure to be their mission control when they log in and everything is right there in front of them really makes a lot of sense. Follow-on question for you, Christine. To foster a shared understanding across teams, how do you get appropriate participation across teams including those that don’t necessarily author or drive changes actively? How do you know you need their input, and how do you pull them into the system when they’re not really an active participant?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, absolutely. To help facilitate communication, we actually use the “comments only” or “optional approval” a whole lot in our systems to help certain functions stay informed but not necessarily hold up the change. It works really well in our purchasing department when we have a customer order that we enter that’s DO-rated for our government contract. In other words, it has to come above all other orders when we put it into the system. Purchasing gets an alert and a flag that they understand that they need to get these raw materials on order right away, possibly move them up, and try to get them in-house and available for use to try to meet customer satisfaction. It really has been a great way that we found to use Arena to help get everyone on board and on the same page communication-wise.

George Lewis

Tony, I’d be curious to hear your input on how you’re doing things at Insulet.

Tony Bairos

Yeah, we actually include all affected groups in the change control board. I think this prevents surprises to some groups. To give you an example, Insulet, before a year ago when we built our world-class manufacturing center, it’s actually all automated, we were 100% contract manufacturer. So when we had ECOs, we would typically get them approved by the manufacturing engineering department who would typically correspond with our CM. Well, so we went along that way, but then as we were developing the automated manufacturing site we have a new group called automation engineering. And some of the first changes that went through actually affected the automation, and they weren’t aware of it. So we actually brought them into the change control board because even though you’re making a change to the product, this may also affect the automation equipment itself. So it’s very important for us to include all affected departments so that our product and our engineering teams, as well as our automation engineering teams, are all on board with the change.

Cindy Lalowski

In terms of getting everybody to buy in, we do the same thing; we use “optional” and we use “comments only.” Since our company is pretty small, we know how everybody fits in, and we ad hoc approvers. It could be “comments only” as needed because we always pretty much know who we need to add in there.

George Lewis

Any additional thoughts from Tony perhaps? Christine?

Tony Bairos

I talked a lot about selling PLM, and one of the things that I always tell people is that PLM does not take the place of human interactions. Conversations still have to take place. For example, ECO originators should always have conversations with approvers as they’re formulating their change order packages. This way when it gets to the approval stage it’s almost like a rubber stamp. The approvers know what’s coming, the ECO originators have already explained everything to them, and you’re not using the system to eliminate human interaction.

Christine Pompa

Tony, I agree with you 100%. Human conversations are good and really, really necessary. But I still think they should be brought back to the PLM as a product record. Scribe is one way we’re using to communicate remotely and still have a conversation. We actually started it to help supplement face-to-face conversations that aren’t taking place while people are out, especially with tickets. I use tickets to track my quality engineer and my system analyst’s projects and it’s really a great way to have a conversation regarding what’s going on with a project but still include the stakeholder in the dialogue. I love that the data is kept as a record and you can refer back to that whenever you want. It’s really nice, and it helps create a history of what went on with that item or change or ticket and where it’s been through its entire life. So I really like that.

Tony Bairos

I totally agree, Christine, having some history is so important. Often people say, “PLM has everything messed up.” But no, no, PLM is just highlighting the sins of the past.

George Lewis

That’s great.

Cindy Lalowski

Let me interject, too. I think that one of the great things about Arena and going through the online approval process is the ability of the CCB members to add their comments. We have these different stages, so document control is always the last stage. A lot of people will sometimes comment, and they’ll approve. But what it always has to do as being the last-stage approval is to go back and address those comments and make sure that if you determine that that comment is something that needs to be addressed before you actually release that change, the system allows for you to do that. And sometimes, yes, you do have to take that offline. You can do that via having a meeting. Right now that would be a Zoom meeting or something like that.

When you’re in the office, it’s nice because you can just walk around and talk to people. I do agree that that human interaction is really a good thing to do. In the time that I’ve been at AEye, we’ve only had to have a couple of meetings and those were mostly to discuss inventory disposition. I agree that there are times that you do need to actually have a meeting to get a change processed.

George Lewis

Really great discussion everybody. That’s all spot on. I think it’s super helpful for everybody on the call here today. Great stuff. We’d like to do another poll as we shift to talk about 2020 and beyond. As a reminder, you should see the poll question on the right side of your screen if you’re joining in via a web browser. If you’re joining us from the Arena Events mobile app, look for the live poll option right below our video feed. And so the second question is, “How has your decision-making been impacted in 2020?” Again, I’ll let you respond to that. We’ll come back and take a look at the responses here after we get through another question for the panel.

Okay, so panel question number three, pandemic-related: What impact have current events had on your change control boards or design review teams? Has there been any change in volume or the need to conduct additional meetings, like virtual meetings, like Zoom? Cindy, you actually mentioned that just previously, that you hop on Zoom to discuss inventory disposition here or there. Any additional thoughts on additional virtual meetings needed or anything like that for your organization?

Cindy Lalowski

Not really. As I mentioned, we process quite a few changes. We’re in the design and development stage on our product and moving along and documenting all of our test cases and everything that we need to document. But this really hasn’t changed our processes, the way we conduct business at all. Everything is just pretty much status quo for us.

George Lewis

Christine, how about for you? I mean, you’re an essential business, correct?

Christine Pompa

Yep. Yeah, we are. We’re actually an essential business. But being located in New York, we’re really trying to support the cause in order to keep everyone safe and healthy. So a lot of our office personnel are working from home at least a few days a week. We’re trying to switch on and off, so our engineers and our salespeople and some of our support staff. It’s cost us to rely more heavily on virtual meetings, but we really haven’t seen a change in the number of changes that we’re processing or any type of lag in our timing of processing changes. That’s a good thing, we’re happy about that.

George Lewis

Yeah, no, that’s great for eMagin there. Tony, what’s your perspective on it?

Tony Bairos

Luckily, we had just implemented our PLM about a year ago so our processes have not necessarily changed due to the current situation. Be we are definitely glad we implemented PLM when we did, for sure.

George Lewis

Yeah, I mean what would it be like if we had the current events and you’re still on paper, Tony? Could you have made it work?

Tony Bairos

I can envision how that would be, and it definitely wouldn’t work.

George Lewis

Yeah, there are still so many organizations running on paper these days, and the ability to adapt to the changing environment would be nearly impossible on paper. That’d be very tough for an organization. Okay, so moving on to the second poll’s results, we asked you how 2020 has impacted your team’s decision-making. Let’s take a look at what you all thought. Oh, interesting, we have a pretty good split, although discovering process gaps or limitations is the leading subject here. Interesting. I could see how that could be the case where not having the process fully developed in your solution might expose some of the holes in it or, especially where everybody is virtual, might make it a little bit more different. Hopefully, some of the discussion so far can give you ways to consider adapting your solution and perhaps using the “comments only” or some of the other features that our panel has described so far. But great poll, good results.

Moving on to the final question for our panel: As veterans in the industry, what could be the new working normal? What do you think your team will take from your experience this year and into the future? How is it going to change the working environment? Tony, why don’t you lead off on this one?

Tony Bairos

This one’s interesting because Insulet just experienced our first medical device single audit program audit, and it was virtual. It was interesting because it was set up similar to an onsite audit where we had a front room and a back room and where the front room processes requests back to the back room, the back room fills requests, they send them back to the front room, and you have people preparing to speak to the auditor.

Well, the big difference though was that this was on a conference call, not video. We did not have a scribe. The scribe in the front room, what they do is scribe the entire audit, everything that’s been said to the auditor, everything the auditor is actually saying. They actually also scribe to the back room the general feeling of the audit and the body language of the auditor or where the auditor might be going. So it was just very interesting to see the different dynamic about what our current situation has done to even just audits.

I mean, I think that the auditors are learning with us. You know what I mean? It was just a big learning experience for the company being audited but also the auditors not being in that face-to-face interaction. I feel like everybody is going to learn from this in general and a lot of processes are going to be in a make-it-or-break-it situation after this, right? Some companies are going to find that working from home works well, and they’re going to have less overhead with office space. And some companies might find that they really need the people in the office. I think things are going to change, some for better, some for worse, after this.

George Lewis

That makes a lot of sense, Tony. Yeah, I think we’re all adapting and certainly trying to figure it all out as we go. Christine, how’s the impact been, or how do you perceive the impact will be at eMagin in the coming weeks and months?

Christine Pompa

I think that this whole experience has taught us that we can be more flexible in our work environment and still get what needs to be done complete. As we move out of this pandemic, it seems like there’s going to be a whole lot more virtual discussions and opportunities to share information in a manner that really wasn’t well-received before. I’m thinking now, just like Tony, specifically of quality audits like supplier audits, inter audits, third-party audits, customer audits. I think that people are getting used to this new normal. Although face-to-face meetings are important to get everyone on board, I think that people are going to start supplementing them with virtual meetings and discussions.

What I really like about it is having all of your data in one repository really helps the process of sharing information digitally, and I think it helps manage time efficiently and effectively in these meetings. I think it’s really going to be key as we move forward and move on from this situation.

George Lewis

Yeah, having that baseline to work off as somebody’s working off … the cliché term, “single version of the truth,” as we’ve always talked about in PLM, certainly becomes critical as everybody’s virtual. Cindy, how do you think it will change for AEye? Any notable trends that you’re seeing?

Cindy Lalowski

Not really. We were scheduled to go through our ISO 9001 external audit, but that didn’t happen because of the pandemic. We pushed that out. It would probably be June/July before we get back to that. But for our internal audits, we will be conducting, I would say, 90% of those via Zoom. What I really like about using Arena is that we use different modules, so we have our Training module, all of our training records are in Arena. We also use the Projects module. So for an automotive company, in the Projects module, we have what’s called APQP. It’s basically a checklist of the different phase gates of the product that you go through. The phase gates are signed off actually in the Projects module so when we get to the design and development portion of that, all of the information is right there in Arena.

We use the Quality module. Again, all of the information is right there in Arena. I really like that we’re going to be able to do a lot of our audits in a virtual manner. When I was talking with the external auditor, they are going to be moving in that manner as well. So they’ll be offering virtual audits, which as we all know, that hey, that’s going to cut down costs for us as a customer. That will work out really well, we won’t have to pay for their travel, et cetera. I think that the change is going to be good for a lot of people.

George Lewis

Yeah, I mean it’s certainly forcing us all to work in entirely new ways, right?

George Lewis

I’m not here at the Arena office despite the fact that it perhaps may look that way. We’re figuring out all of the bells and whistles and Zoom and WebEx and all those other tools and figuring out new ways to work.

I think flexibility is a theme that I’ve heard from other business executives as well. In a recent conversation with the Arena CTO, I was asking him how his team was doing since they’re typically in the office. He felt the previous requirement of being in the office for four days a week may be proven to be outdated. To be determined, but his team is getting a lot done in a virtual work environment and certainly, in the foreseeable future, the need to head into an office is curtailed or greatly changed if you are headed in. But looking beyond the pandemic, it’s hard to believe that the same assumptions about working, location, and even corporate real estate decisions will ever be the same.

Okay, well that wraps up the panel discussion. We’ve had a great time sharing with you today. We encourage you to stay for a few minutes of Q&A. We do have some questions in the queue here. I hope it was useful to learn how other customers are using Arena during these uncertain times. And I hope you picked up a few tips and tricks that’ll help your virtual teams work more efficiently within Arena.

In the Arena Event app, we’ve uploaded the second in a series of resource guides for your reference. It’s called Getting to Milestones, and it outlines the good, better, and best practices collaborating with your teams to drive the right decisions in the timelines you need. Okay, so with that, let’s move into the Q&A portion of today’s event. You can submit your questions using the “ask a question” area or upvote a question that someone else has already asked. Votes help us to prioritize the questions in case we don’t get to them all. And if we don’t get to your question today, don’t fret. We’ll follow up with you on your question in the Arena Events discussion area and also one-on-one if potentially needed.

Let me take a look at the questions here. A popular one here that’s got a couple of votes is, “Can anyone give examples of how they’ve used Arena to better improve communications with suppliers working remotely during this pandemic?” Anyone of you three wants to take that?

Christine Pompa

Yeah, I’ll take that. We’re actually looking at drawing our suppliers into our workspace through supplier corrective actions in the quality role. Right now we’ve been using it where we … We’re finding it challenging when contacting our suppliers in getting a hold of them when we have an issue. Up until this point, we’ve been asking our suppliers to complete a form and then uploading it into Arena in a quality template for peer review. It’s really caused us now to start looking at a process where we can have our suppliers provide root cause and corrective action right into your system rather than having it upload through a form. It’s quite an exciting project for us, and I’m really looking forward to getting it launched and settled up and working.

George Lewis

Great. Thanks, Christine. Another question here, “Does anybody use Projects to drive completion, release, and implementation of ECOs?”

Tony Bairos

Yeah, we actually do at Insulet. We call it the closed-loop ECO process. Basically, the way that works is the change administrator will initiate the project and based on what is happening with the ECO and how some of the questions have been answered in the disposition, they will initiate tasks and assign them out to the different groups to carry out rework or scrap or so on and so forth. It hasn’t been a perfectly smooth process but it has been working. We recently have been just struggling a little bit with knowing who exactly to assign for each task but we’re ironing out those details. We’ve had a few meetings over the last week to iron some of that out, and we’re very hopeful that it’s going to work really well for us.

George Lewis

That’s great. Yeah, that’s a clever use of the Project tool, probably gives you a more robust capability of tracking the implementation side of a change order.

Tony Bairos

For sure. I mean, there were concerns before to make sure that scraps were carried out and inventory was removed out of quarantine or whatever. We developed this process to ensure that each task is carried out and closed out and confirmed and there’s actual history around it.

George Lewis

That’s great, Tony. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Another question here, “I’d like to know how we have use the closed-loop change management through Arena?” I don’t think I read that right. “I would like to know how we can use closed-loop change management in Arena?” I think that’s the point of the question here.

Cindy Lalowski

I can take that one.

George Lewis

Cindy, any thoughts on that one?

Cindy Lalowski

Yeah, yeah. Actually, what I really like about the change control function is that when you approve and release a change, you always have your inventory disposition completed before anyone even approves the change. But you have that Implementation tab, and we use that Implementation tab. So if there’s rework or scrap, we always change the status to in-process. If we have something that’s rework or scrap, we go into the Quality module and we use non-conforming material reports or the NCMR template. So we create an NCMR. Another thing I really like about Arena too is that everything is so interrelated. You can go on the NCMR tab, you can connect it to the item that you’re scrapping or reworking. You can connect the ECO. So all the information is right there. It’s on the NCMR, it’s in the ECO, and it’s on the item. It’s just all right there.

We do follow up. We actually have another group, the purchasing group or planning group moves the material from stock or whatever location it is into MRB for scrap disposition or rework. So we always follow up with the NCMR and make sure that the rework has been done and then we close out the ECO. That’s really the closed-loop. If you’re releasing something, it’s just a straight release, you’re done. But if you’re reworking, scrapping, or any other type of material disposition, we use that Implementation tap to close it out.

Christine Pompa

That’s really funny because we use the Implementation tab also a whole lot. But we use it when we move from a temporary change to a permanent change. We create a report that our engineers provide via peer review. Once the report has been accepted, we’ll put that report into the Implementation’s tab as a file so that way anybody can go back and review that report to see exactly why and how we made the decision to convert it to an ECN. That’s how we use it. It works really well on our process because then you have that record of what justified moving it from a temporary change to a permanent change.

Tony Bairos

Insulet has been considering a similar strategy in a different direction and that is the use of change requests. We’ve been talking a lot about using the change request process to manage our change development planning. Basically, conceptual proposals would go through a change request and then be approved through a higher-level strategy board. And then once approved, that would progress on to the ECO process, and the ECO process would actually take care of the more detail of the change, changing the parts and the BOMs and everything that would follow on from that higher-level conceptual change request.

George Lewis

I’m glad you mentioned that, Tony. You actually dovetailed into the final question here, which is a really popular one, on change requests. “Do your teams use them, and if so, in what instances?” Cindy or Christine, any additional thoughts on the use of a request at all?

Cindy Lalowski

Sure. We actually use the change request form as opposed to the Request module in Arena. I guess one of the things I don’t like about the Request module is that the request goes in, you have an evaluator group, but it just sits there. It doesn’t progress unless, I guess, you babysit it or somehow force it to do so. I like the concept of having all of the information in the Request module because bam, you just turn it right into any ECO. That’s the one concept that I do like about the Request module. I have used it at the past companies that I’ve worked for, but we don’t here.

Tony Bairos

Another interesting use that I’ve seen with the change request is … I mean, I just described how Insulet has been talking about using change requests, but at other companies, we’ve developed a process where we use change requests to communicate with our contract manufacturers. It was a really sleek way of having changes from the contract manufacturers come into the company and be approved or denied. If they’re approved, they go on to ECO, they make the changes, and then the information gets fed back to the contract manufacturer, where if it gets rejected, it simply just goes back to the contract manufacturer with a rejection of the proposal.

George Lewis

Very good. One more question to fit in here, and I think this will be the final question for today. Interesting question. “Are there any teams or tools that track continuous improvement and change management in Arena, is it able to assist with that?” I think the nexus of this question is, how does Arena help with continuous improvement in organizations?

Christine Pompa

We’re actually looking at capturing our continuous improvement projects through the Quality module. We haven’t set it up but, again, that’s something that we’re working towards. Because I think it’s really nice to have all of your projects in one place so that you can go back and refer to them each time. As long as you set it up so that you have the approvals and reviews, I think it would be really good to document that in Arena.

George Lewis

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Christine.