Managing Automation - June 2008 - (Page 36)

[ SPECIAL REPORT ] the site. In the ideal situation, we’d like suppliers to see files directly from the product data management [system],” he says. WHO PAYS FOR CONTROL? While on-premise PLM offers a higher degree of control and security, the question for some manufacturers operating in highly competitive markets boils down to: Who will pay for the costlier behind-the-firewall deployment? “Control is great. However, will your customer value that and pay you a premium because you invested in that? That’s not the modern world we live in,” says Joe McDon- comes clear that the company had better make sure there is a methodical way to track engineering changes and manage the supply chain. Stretch’s solution: “We use Arena to track all that,” McDonough says. Specifically, Stretch has been using Arena’s multi-tenant SaaS offering since December 2007, and it has seen a difference in the way customers and suppliers react to the company. “We sell to big system manufacturers. Their supply chain makes ours look like child’s play,” McDonough says. “And when they audit us, they want to know what kind of engineering change control we have. They want us to “Control is great. However, will your customer value that and pay you a premium because you invested in that?” — Stretch’s McDonough ough, senior director of customer service and supply operations at Stretch Inc., a semiconductor startup that makes chips and boards for surveillance cameras, including IP-based cameras and digital video recorders. Stretch would rather put its money toward semiconductor innovation than running the software that manages its supply chain, he says. For that reason, Stretch chose a lower-cost, scalable, multi-tenant SaaS deployment option. The 4-year-old company started as a chip manufacturer, with only three suppliers to manage. But when it got into the board business recently, the number of vendors in the supply chain ballooned. Stretch designs and builds boards with hundreds of parts, and the board designs change every managingautomation.com three months or so. That means the company has about 100 suppliers to RELATED ARTICLES: track, and it needed a standard platPLM’s Vertical Challenge www.managingautomation.com/plm10 form for communicating with contract manufacturers, design houses, Enterprise PLM: Will More Integration Offer a Cure? and internal engineers. www.managingautomation.com/plm8 “The nightmare scenario you are PLM and Manufacturing: A Digital Bond trying to avoid is that you build a thouwww.managingautomation.com/plm9 sand boards or more, and somebody in the supply chain has used the COMPANIES MENTIONED: wrong [bill of materials], and you have Arena Solutions to either rework or throw away all that www.managingautomation.com/arena3 product,” McDonough says. Centric Software Add to that the fact that Stretch www.managingautomation.com/centric must comply with environmental regParametric Technology Corp. ulations — such as the RoHS Direcwww.managingautomation.com/ptc tive, which restricts the use of certain Siemens hazardous substances in electrical and www.managingautomation.com/siemens electronic equipment — and it beshow them our ROHS certifications, as well as the board assembly qualification data. Because of Arena and the ability to collect all of that data, track changes, and provide history and certification information, we are passing audits with flying colors.” One might think there’s a big price tag accompanying all of this capability — tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps? Not even close. “Our cost is $5,000 for a one-year subscription,” McDonough says. Arena is able to offer its PLM solution so inexpensively specifically because of the multitenant model. The company hosts all of its customers on one instance of the software, eliminating hardware partitioning and separate software installations. At the same time, Arena assures data reliability and security. To date, McDonough feels comfortable with Arena’s ability to maintain data integrity. While McDonough recognizes that many manufacturing executives still operate with a traditional mind-set, believing that critical business functions can’t be trusted to anyone outside the company. But total control costs money and does not necessarily give a company a competitive advantage, he says. Meanwhile, for this company, which plans to triple its sales within the next 18 months, the SaaS, multi-tenant model offers scalability. “There’s a huge resource that is the infrastructure of the Worldwide Web. The SaaS model piggybacks off of that,” McDonough says. So scaling is not a problem. Adding more users is simply a matter of “flicking the switch and giving them an ID,” he says. ■ maonline ma June 36 2008 http://managingautomation.com http://www.managingautomation.com/plm10 http://www.managingautomation.com/plm8 http://www.managingautomation.com/plm9 http://www.managingautomation.com/arena3 http://www.managingautomation.com/centric http://www.managingautomation.com/ptc http://www.managingautomation.com/siemens

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - June 2008

Managing Automation - June 2008 Contents Take 1 SAP Cites Functionality, Cost Structure in Modified On-Demand Product Rollout Dassault Exec Predicts More PLM Consolidation The Blackberry Goes Native with SAP CRM QAD Brings MDM In-House with FullTilt Buy Power Experts Look to End Voltage Sags The Progressive Manufacturers Notes Cover Story: Playing the Globalization Game to Win Special Report Integration Transformation Industries Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - June 2008

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