A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Arena Partlist and your BOM in the cloud

Arena Partlist and your BOM in the cloud
Oleg
Oleg
1 March, 2012 | 2 min for reading

I think, 2012 will become a year of cloud. Arena Solutions is not a new kid in the block. The company was pioneering On-Demand, SaaS and recently cloud technologies for the last decade. My attention was caught my Arena’s press release yesterday – Arena Launches New Products to Help Engineers Go From Prototype to Production. In a nutshell, Arena is releasing a new tool (called PartLists). Here is how it explained in the press release:

PartsList is a lightweight BOM management app, and PDXViewer is an easy-to-use build package viewer. Using PartsList and PDXViewer together, engineers can import designs from ECAD, automatically complete documentation, then share completed BOMs or PDX build packages with anyone.

A couple of months ago, I had a conversation with Arena product and marketing people about this tool. Back that time, the product name was PDXViewer. It took some time to Arena to bring this tool to the market. Name was changed as well as some additional features were added

PLM and Simplification

What is interesting in Arena PartList is that confirms the idea of simplification as one of the fundamental innovation drivers these days. Arena dropped PLM from the name, back to basics of BOM and introduce the tool that can be used by everyone immediately.

Integration is a key.

One of the painful elements in the work of engineers is when they need re-enter information twice. This is the most stupid thing and software vendors need to solve it. Arena allows to connect to part catalogs of suppliers as well supports importing tools. In my view, it is not enough. In the past, Arena Solution was troubled by CAD-PLM integrations. To integrated CAD and On-Deman PLM wasn’t simple back in 2000s. But today, it is different. I want to see more how Arena PartList solves integration challenges to prevent engineers to re-enter information to their Bill of Materials. PartList proposed import/export using excel and CSV files. However, it sounds ’95 and way too complicated for web solution.

What is my conclusion? I think, simplification is a key. Arena PartList is cool and great from that standpoint. It reminded me one of my Google-related posts. I can almost use Google spreadsheets (sorta-Excel-in-the-cloud). The ability to bring CAD bill of material in and massage until it becomes real Bill of Material is one that probably missed. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. Arena didn’t pay me to write this post.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
8 May, 2009

  Life around us is changing dramatically. The current global economic situation and technology have the potential to change the...

16 February, 2016

Major pillars of enterprise software in every manufacturing company are represented by the silos – engineering, manufacturing planning, shop-flow control. Historically...

1 July, 2011

This week was packed with multiple announcements and events. One of them happened in Paris – first Dassault Application Innovation...

9 October, 2012

In the world of cloud applications, there is a magic term “multi-tenancy” that usually raises many debates. A couple of...

8 August, 2019

Marketplace is an interesting concept and it seems to be progressing well in a modern cloud-based and internet aware economy....

1 February, 2010

Discussion started last week with Jim Brown got me think more about ERP and PLM. I have to say, this...

18 July, 2014

Email is a king of communication in every company. Many companies are literally run by email. People are using it...

26 November, 2009

Some thoughts around future 3D Marketplace. Few days ago, I had chance to post of future of 3D Warehouse. Thanks...

5 June, 2022

Earlier last week, I shared my perspective on how I see the future of post-monolithic PLM systems. If you missed...

Blogroll

To the top